ESPHome Native Component for NSPanel (beta)

This project is designed to utilise the UI provided by NSPanel Lovelace UI, but use a native ESPHome component for the backend. My core goals for the project were to:

• Reduce bandwidth consumption - by utilising the efficient TCP communication implemented by ESPHome.
• Remove the need for an MQTT broker and make the device able to function on a minimal level during network outages.
• Make the screen more responsive by having the ESP32 do some of the heavy lifting (the ESP32 is actually quite powerful!)

A special thanks goes to these great projects for making this possible:

• NSPanel Lovelace UI
• ESPHome NSPanel Lovelace UI
• ESPHome

Installation

The installation of ESPHome on the ESP32 follows the standard ESPHome build method e.g. esphome run --device COM6 basic-example.yaml. It is possible to do OTA updates with the ESPHome CLI after the initial upload.

For the GUI, this project relies on the HMI TFT firmware from the ESPHome NSPanel Lovelace UI project. The firmware version reported by the screen needs to be 52 or 53 for it to be compatible with this project. If you don't have the custom HMI TFT firmware installed already you will need to upload the appropriate nspanel*.tft file from v4.3.3 of the project which can be found here. You can upload the correct TFT firmware after installing this component on the ESP32 by using the upload_tft service (seen in the basic example) exposed by the device in HomeAssistant.

Configuration

A basic configuration can be found in the basic example, but you'll probably also want to look at the advanced example which shows the features currently available. This is loosely based on the appdaemon configuration format (found here) to make it easier to transition to this native ESPHome solution, but please don't expect this to translate exactly as it is not possible to make it work in the exact same way given the limitations of the ESP32.

Icons

• Icon values can be an icon name or hex value (e.g. hex:E549). A list of icons can be found here: https://docs.nspanel.pky.eu/icon-cheatsheet.html
• Icon colours need to be a 16-bit number (0-65535) representing a rgb565 colour code. This website can be used to select your colour https://chrishewett.com/blog/true-rgb565-colour-picker/ - then you take the rgb565 hex value and convert it to a number (e.g. #ce79 -> 52857).

Help Needed!

As much as I love embedded programming, I am unable to dedicate the time required to make this project great without the help of others. This is a beta project which is not fully functional yet and is subject to change without notice. It has taken a lot of time and effort to get the project to this point and it will take a lot more time to get the project past beta.

There are many UI components missing and the python build script is in dire need of refactoring (I butchered it together to get it working but PRs to the ESPHome repo are required to provide more flexibility over code generation).

Currently the following features work:

• Screensaver with time, date, weather and status icon display
• Support for cardGrid, cardGrid2, cardEntities, cardQR, cardAlarm, cardThermo, cardMedia
• Most entity types should display on cards. Lights, switches, sensors and scenes have been tested to work, with additional support for the popupLight and popupTimer pages.

There is currently no support for these cards: cardPower. cardUnlock, cardChart - but these are planned for the future. Please see the HMI readme for more info on the cards mentioned above.

PRs to expand the functionality or fix bugs are very welcome!

Known Issues

1. Weather forecast is not displayed on the screensaver when using Home Assistant 2024.4 or later

This issue is due to the forecast attribute being removed from weather entities. There is currently no alternative way to fetch this data with the current ESPHome functionality but I hope to get this fixed (see this feature request). More info on the issue can be found here.

As a workaround, please add the following to your Home Assistant configuration (changing weather.home to your actual weather entity_id) then update the weather entity_id in your esphome config to the unique_id seen below (i.e. sensor.weather_forecast_daily) - thanks @CultusMechanicus for this snippet!

template:
  - trigger:
      - platform: time_pattern
        hours: /1
      - platform: homeassistant
        event: start
    action:
      - service: weather.get_forecasts
        data:
          type: daily
        target:
          entity_id: weather.home # change to your weather entity
        response_variable: daily
    sensor:
      - name: Weather Forecast Daily
        unique_id: weather_forecast_daily # Use this id in your esphome config (screensaver -> weather -> entity_id)
        state: "{{ states('weather.home') }}" # # change to your weather entity in this line
        attributes:
          temperature: "{{ state_attr('weather.home', 'temperature') }}" # change to your weather entity
          temperature_unit: "{{ state_attr('weather.home', 'temperature_unit') }}" # change to your weather entity
          forecast: "{{ daily['weather.home'].forecast }}" # change to your weather entity

License

Code in this repository is licensed under the GPLv3 license. Third-party code used in this project have their own license terms. Please see the license document for more information.