This request comes from a person who reached out to me via the Tindie shop. They have a child in the home who likes to tamper with electronics.
This sounds like the kind of home where it’d be great to have an open source thermostat! Maybe when this kid gets older, they’ll be making customizations and improvements.
I took a quick look at what would be required to do this with the current screen and it looks like the touch-screen can be turned off. I’m not sure if changing lightdm.conf would require a reboot, but even if so, that might still be an acceptable price to pay (as long as the lock/unlock isn’t something that needs to be done frequently).
Another way to implement this would be do to so in the OpenHAB rules. When “locked”, the user could still go from one screen to another, but functional changes (adjusting the set point, boost, turning on the fan) would not work. We’d need to have a locked/unlocked variable in OpenHAB and we’d also want to add some visual indicator to the screen so people would know why none of the buttons are working.
I don’t expect that I will be able to personally get to this in the short term, but I wanted to put it here in case anyone else wanted to try to take this on, or at the bare minimum so we don’t forget to come back to this later.