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 tap on a cover now opens a card like Home Assistant's own, in the style
of the climate and vacuum cards: a tall position slider on which the blind
hangs from the top, a tilt slider over slats for venetian blinds, and open,
stop and close keys. The key of the direction the cover moves is filled; a
key that cannot move it further is disabled and stays out of the keys the
card's tick enables. Sliders show their value while dragged and send it on
release. The card offers only what supported_features allows. A
battery-powered blind shows its battery at the top right: the app sends
the device's battery sensor as the extra the vacuum card uses, and adds
current_tilt_position to the attributes.
Checking Studio 1 after its update to firmware 0.2.49 found that a setting
number equal to its initial state 0 (night brightness 0 %) was never
published, so Home Assistant kept it unknown and ESP Screens could not
change it; apply_screen_settings now publishes a number without a state.
The app also took "unavailable" for the device name during the restart
and wrote sensor.esp_screens_unavailable; diagnostics ignore unknown and
unavailable. The editor redraws its tiles, top bar and entity list when
the live stream opened a screen before the first full inventory (a busy
add-on), and loads app.js and style.css by content stamp after Safari kept
an old script.
Checked with 254 Python and 14 C++ tests, generate_packages --check, ESP32
builds of both profiles, and 20 API checks of the card on host builds of
both boards. Firmware 0.2.50.
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>
Max Gramser