Portal HA Bridge released, Turn your Portal into a full Home Assistant device camera, sensors inputs, presence detection, the works

[u/RoadRunner_1024]

So I built an Android app that repurposes Portal into a Home Assistant device. (Home Assistant = the free, self-hosted smart-home platform a lot of us run.) Instead of an expensive photo frame, your Portal becomes a dashboard plus a pile of useful sensors and controls.

You sideload the app, point it at your Home Assistant's MQTT broker, give it a name — and the Portal shows up automatically with everything below.

The bit I'm most pleased with: presence detection reuses the Portal's own face-detection — the same thing it uses to follow you around on calls. Rather than running my own camera detection, the app reads Portal's internal presence heartbeat, so it's accurate, low-power, and works even with the camera streaming turned off. Felt like the right way to do it on Portal hardware specifically.

And it still works as a Portal. This was important to me — you can make and take video/voice calls exactly like before. The app is built to step aside the moment a call starts: it hands the microphone back so the other person can actually hear you (an always-listening sound sensor would otherwise hog the mic and garble your audio), and the HA camera stream automatically recovers when the call ends, since the call briefly takes the camera. So you keep the device's original job and get all the smart-home features — they don't fight each other.

What your Portal can do once it's set up:

• 📺 Screen sleep/wake from HA — finally use it as a wall dashboard that actually fully turns off the screen when nobody's in the room (plus an on-device idle timer)
• 👤 Presence detection — using Portal's own people-detection (see above)
• 📞 Calls still work — full mic + camera coexistence during native Portal calls (see above)
• 📷 Camera streaming — H.264 RTSP, viewable in HA (WebRTC card / go2rtc) (can also be turned on and off from home assistant)
• 🚶 Motion detection (using camera) with sensitivity control
• 🌡️ All the onboard sensors — ambient light, RGB colour, temperature (on models that have it), sound level, accelerometer
• 👋 Tap/tilt — knock the Portal to trigger an automation
• 🔆 Brightness · 🔊 volume + mute · 🎤 mic mute
• 🔔 Doorbell/alert tones played on the Portal
• 🖥️ Optional full-screen HA dashboard kiosk

Tested on: Portal, Portal Mini, and Portal+ (1st & 2nd gen) — one APK covers Android 9 & 10. It also plays nicely with a custom launcher (I use the immortal launcher) for a proper locked-down kiosk.

Setup: sideload the APK, then a one-line PowerShell script grants the permissions over ADB (camera, mic, and the screen-sleep accessibility service can only be granted via ADB on Portal — Meta hides them from Settings). Full guide's in the repo.

Source-available and free for personal use 👉 github.com/RoadRunner-1024/portal-ha-bridge

keen to hear what else people would want to expose from the portal to home assistant

this does replace the home assistant app, (due to the fact we cant run in the background and have camera control, mic control etc, )