SA/Home Assistant Monitoring with dedicated small Touchscreen displays

[Jazzmonger]

I thought I'd share my results of my quest to implement a dedicated touchscreen displays on my home assistant setup around my house.
Yes, it was DAUNTING at first. Take a quick search at AliExpress for touchscreen, and you find way too many. They are everywhere. Plus you have to figure out how to get them to actually display stuff. Touchscreens are NOT plug and play, so this is not for the casual enthusiast... I have several different displays, but my favorite so far are the Sunton series, 5" and 7", 480x800 resolution. Beautiful, rich colors and perfect touch response. And they are easy to mount in 3D printed enclosures and then on the wall.


The solar screen looks like this:



Other screens display just about anything you can come up with. My screens vary from Media, thermostats, cameras,etc. You control screens using automations in home assistant. For example, when a delivery truck shows up and motion is detected the screen automatically switches to the cameras for 60s then back. When I set Alexa timers,the timer screen is active while any timers still count down.



After much research on what works best with home assistant and touch screens I settled on the OpenHASP project to program the screens. Data is pushed to the display via mqtt commands from home assistant, so any data in ha is fair game to display on the screen. There is a guy writing a screen designer app, but it's in the early stages, so right now there are vast amounts of time spent adjusting pixels and positioning for objects on the screen. But folks like me are sharing their designs and entire configs on GitHub so you can start there and just copy what we've done and tweak for your needs. I'm not even going to try and calculate how much time I put into this so far. It's A Lot.

OpenHASP project:

Redirecting

My displays:

Sunton Screens - openHASP

Open firmware for MCUs to drive a low-cost commodity touch display

openhasp.com

I created a repository for my all of my configs on Github for those interested. Hopefully this inspires others!

GitHub - jazzmonger/OpenHasp: My OpenHasp Configs

My OpenHasp Configs. Contribute to jazzmonger/OpenHasp development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Jeff

 

[wattmatters]

Interesting. Well done. Above my pay grade though I think.

 

[Craig]

Very nice work! I can definitely appreciate spending untold hours working on something like this.

 

[Jazzmonger]

Thanks guys. It’s not so bad if you start with existing config files like I’ve published.


In action in my kitchen.

 

[Craig]

Just out of couriosity whats the static power draw from one of these devices? Do they sleep when not in use. I can envision having about 10 of these scattered around the homestead

 

[Craig]

Also are you running this of an esp-32 or something else?

 

[Jazzmonger]

Just out of couriosity whats the static power draw from one of these devices? Do they sleep when not in use. I can envision having about 10 of these scattered around the homestead

Smal draw (5V 1A Power Supplies power them via USB-C), and yes, you can program everything about sleeping. I have an existing motion sensor in my kitchen, so when I move the display wakes up via a HA Automation. There are also extra pins on the ESP in the display that can be repurposed to hook up a motion detector and to wake it up. Home Assistant runs on a NUC, Solar Assistant on a Pi. There's a link in the first post to the displays but basically they are powered by an ESP32: