Wake from Home Assistant counted as a tap: it reset last_touch_ms, the one
clock that standby and Back to page 1 both read. An automation pressing Wake
on every motion therefore held an open card or page 2 up for as long as
someone moved in the room. Back to page 1 now has its own clock, last_use_ms,
written only by the boot, the touchscreen triggers, open_settings from Home
Assistant and the UI self test. Wake, an alert ending and Auto standby on
still restart the standby time, and Wake still brings back the brightness and
the second hand.
The rule moved from the interval into the script back_to_page_1_when_due.
Wake runs it right after waking a dimmed screen, so a page whose time ran out
during standby lights up on page 1 instead of jumping there a second later.
ESP Screens no longer opens the first screen by itself. Until one is picked
the page says "Choose a screen", and with no screens it still offers the
install; both cards start hidden so neither flashes while the page loads.
Checked with 48 host API checks per board, both ESP32 builds, 314 Python and
16 C++ tests, and the editor on the demo home. Firmware 0.2.56.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The title label had long_mode: DOT and a width but no height. LVGL 9.5 only
puts the dots on a label whose wrapped text is taller than the label, so the
label grew with its lines and a long title ran into the subtitle. It now has
one line of the headline font as its height (32 px Guition, 21 px CYD).
The Claude skill and the editor's alert tips said the CYD shows about forty
characters of a title; both screens show about twenty.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
One rule ends a Sleep: a tap, Wake or an alert. The Auto standby switch
cleared sleep_requested when Home Assistant turned standby off, while
ESP Screens and the settings page on the screen did not; now only
wake_display clears the flag, and apply_screen_settings still wakes a
screen the standby time dimmed.
dim_display no longer checks anything itself (the interval checks Auto
standby, the Sleep button sets the flag). It dims, then runs go_home with
"also on standby" on, otherwise closes the settings page and every card
through close_cards. Before, it copied half of go_home and hid the four
YAML overlays itself, so a runtime detail card stayed open under a dimmed
screen. close_cards is now the one runtime_tiles::dismiss() call: the
fallback and the widget.hide actions after its return ran for nothing.
The backlight light becomes internal. Home Assistant could change it, but
the minute tick put the level back, and switching it off darkened the
screen without standby. The brightness numbers and Wake/Sleep replace it.
A dead clock-label branch from the manual profile leaves
apply_screen_settings.
Checked with 209 Python and 14 C++ tests, host builds of both boards over
the native API, and ESP32 builds of both Easy profiles. Firmware 0.2.46.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every screen gets two template buttons, Wake and Sleep, for automations
(button.press on button.<screen>_wake / _sleep). Wake does what a tap does:
a dimmed screen runs wake_display, a screen that is on only restarts the
standby count. Sleep dims right away through dim_display, also with Auto
standby off, and closes an alert that is up (reported as remote); it is
ignored during a touch calibration.
A new non-restored flag, sleep_requested, keeps that standby in place:
dim_display dims with standby off, and apply_screen_settings, which runs
every minute, no longer wakes such a screen. wake_display clears it (a tap,
Wake, an alert), and so does the Auto standby switch when it really turns
standby off. Nothing is saved, so the buttons cost no flash writes and may
run on every motion.
The Claude skill, README, add-on docs and RELEASING describe both buttons.
Checked on host builds of both boards over the native API, 24 checks each
(timer, Sleep with Auto standby off across a minute tick, alert,
calibration), and with ESP32 builds of both Easy profiles (+336 B RAM).
Firmware 0.2.45.
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>
Four Home Assistant events change a screen the way the app's own editor does:
esp_screens_add_tile (add or change), esp_screens_remove_tile,
esp_screens_move_tile and esp_screens_order_tiles. An event names the screen by
device name, shown name, area or title, and may set the size, the direct
control, the display, the icon, the colour and the spot; a tile with a control
or a forecast becomes double-width by itself. apply_tile_event returns the new
layout and Manager.save does the validating and the pushing, so nothing can get
past the twenty-tile limit, a duplicate entity or an occupied spot.
Every event is answered with esp_screens_tile_result, and every screen publishes
what it shows as sensor.esp_screens_<node>, with the page, row, column, width,
control and display per tile. So an assistant can read a screen before it moves
anything, and a refused event says why and changes nothing.
The Claude skill gains a Tiles section with the events, the fields, what each
kind of entity can do, how to read a screen first, and the rule to show the plan
and wait for a yes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
App 0.2.48 / firmware 0.2.41:
- Both boards expose the switch "Auto standby", the same standby_enabled setting as the checkbox
in ESP Screens. Off wakes a dimmed screen and keeps it on; on counts the standby time from that
moment. The change is saved on the screen and reported through esphome.screen_setting, so ESP
Screens stores it too. No action runs at boot (restore_mode DISABLED).
- The Claude skill gains "Standby and brightness": the switch, Standby after and the three
brightness numbers, with an example automation that keeps screens awake while someone is home
and a light is on or a window is open.
- EASY_SETUP and the README describe the entities and the automation.
Tested through Home Assistant's API on both bench boards (CYD: dimmed -> off wakes in 1.1 s, stays
bright past the standby time, on dims again after 61 s); see docs/TEST_RESULTS_0248.md, which also
records a CYD rollback after the first OTA that points to memory headroom, not to this change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The app listens for the Home Assistant events esp_screens_show_alert and
esp_screens_dismiss_alert and calls each screen's show_alert/dismiss_alert action,
screens added later included. Fields are typed like Home Assistant's ESPHome action
schema; an unusable value is left empty instead of losing the alert.
- Settings → Claude installs an ESP Screens skill for Claude Code in Home Assistant
(/homeassistant/.claude/skills/esp-screens) or downloads it as a zip for claude.ai.
It is generated from the alert reference, so fields, colors and icons match the firmware.
- New screen, Firmware & USB, firmware updates, Alerts and Claude move to a Settings view;
the header keeps one button. Unselected screens in My screens get a light grey card.
App only; firmware stays 0.2.38.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Max Gramser