Dark mode is a new switch under Brightness on the screen's settings page, in
the Screen settings of ESP Screens and as switch.<screen>_dark_mode in Home
Assistant, so an automation can turn it on at bedtime. The screen changes
look at once, open cards and an alert included, and keeps it after a
restart. The design stays the same: a black page, graphite cards with a
hairline, soft white text, Home Assistant's state colours where they tell
something, and pastel card colours as deeper versions of themselves.
Every colour the firmware chooses now lives in components/smart_display/
theme.h: roles with a light and a dark value, the named card colours and
Home Assistant's state colours. The board profiles give widgets colourless
shared styles that theme.h fills, so a change of look refills those styles
and draws again what code painted by state. The light look is unchanged
apart from merges below one panel step. Dark mode costs 440 bytes of static
RAM on the CYD, and the LVGL tree of the host build is 416 bytes smaller; tests
keep colours out of every other file.
Comparing a screen that switched looks with one that booted in it also
found two older bugs, now fixed: a settings switch that was on showed its
knob at the left whenever its page was drawn, and the sun card's sunlit
area turned orange after a palette change. Firmware 0.2.54.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A code check found that a setting changed on a screen could jump back.
ESP Screen Manager kept its own copy and sent it with every full update:
after a restart of the app or Home Assistant, every hour and after every
save. A change it missed while it or Home Assistant restarted came back
to the old value, a reported setting was lost when save() refused a
layout with a removed entity, and every step of a held - or + on the
screen resent the whole screen.
Firmware 0.2.49 offers every setting as an entity over the existing
preference records (no migration): Night mode, Night starts/ends,
24-hour clock, Back to page 1 and after how long, Back to page 1 on
standby, Swipe between pages and, on the Guition, Rotation, next to the
four numbers and Auto standby. The settings page and every entity write
through settings_screen::set(), which clamps like the page and stores,
applies and reports only a real change. screen_message answers a caller
that asks with its status and layout revision (api.respond). The
settings tile opens without Home Assistant.
The app reads and changes the settings of such a screen through its
entities and leaves them out of the layout message. Older firmware keeps
them with the layout; a setting it reports is stored without the tile
check and not sent back. Pings to screens that can answer learn at once
whether a tile is missing and resend after 30 s instead of 120 s. Layout
sensors come back after a Home Assistant restart, and weather tiles only
ask for the forecasts the entity supports. The editor's settings form is
now three cards with the rows of the screen's own page; a change applies
at once, and an offline screen shows its values as unknown.
Checked with 245 Python and 14 C++ tests, generate_packages --check,
ESP32 builds of both profiles, host-build API tests on both boards, and
a live run against Home Assistant 2026.9.1 with a temporary host device.
Firmware 0.2.49.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Holding the top bar for about a second and a half opens a settings page on the
screen, with a blue line filling along the top edge while you hold. A built-in
screen.settings tile and the esphome.<screen>_open_settings action open it too.
The page is one constexpr table of rows in settings_screen.h: Brightness,
Night, Screen (clock, back to page 1, swiping, rotation) and This screen (name,
address, firmware, Home Assistant, Restart). Toggles flip on a tap, numbers and
times step with -/+ (a held time walks whole hours), a choice cycles in a chip,
and a row that depends on a switch above it is greyed out. The LVGL objects exist
only while the page is open: +608 bytes of RAM and +10.7 KB of flash on the CYD.
A change is saved, applied and reported through the existing screen_setting
event, so ESP Screens shows the same value within a second.
New setting auto_home (default on, 2 minutes): an open card, the settings page
or a later page goes back to page 1 after that long without a touch, not only on
standby. It travels beside the frozen eleven-key settings block with its own
preference, so older firmware and older apps keep working.
docs/SETTINGS.md is the recipe for adding a setting; the Claude skill explains
the page. Firmware 0.2.44.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Max Gramser