Max Gramser
1a6308aba7
A test and code-analysis round of 0.2.72 to 0.2.76 (suites at every tag, sanitizers, ESP32 and GitHub builds, host harnesses on both boards, the editor in a browser, best practice checked against ESPHome, LVGL, Home Assistant and Vue) found these, fixed here with Max's choices for the product questions: - Firmware 0.2.65: the second hand of a single analog clock moves again; on a page that is one full on/off tile the waking push also switches it; on the Guition a flick is never a tap and a finger that slides off a tile doesn't tap it; Previous/Next react to a firm press; the same Go to page tile may sit on several pages; a layout the screen has no memory for is refused instead of crashing; 64-bit redraw mask for 48 tiles; Montserrat 14 no longer built. - App: Save refuses a layout too long for one message or too big for eight pages; an offline screen keeps its firmware version from the device registry; HA refusals reach the editor; 128 KB requests; changelog out of the live stream; cached hashed assets; tini as init and a clean stop; changelog parsing without asterisks or crashes. - Editor: clicking the open screen keeps unsaved edits, edits during a save stay unsaved, a Page row and phone dragging to other pages, repeated page tiles, limits from the server, HA's error messages, a type-checked build. - tools/check.sh + GitHub Actions + a CYD flash budget; docs match 48 tiles and the new editor. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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ESP Screens: the full reference
The README shows what ESP Screens is and how to install it. This page has the rest: every card and setting, what an automation can do with a screen, the top bar, the settings page on the screen itself, and how updates work.
- What you can configure
- Alert from an automation
- Wake and sleep from an automation
- Customizing tiles and colors
- Top bar
- Settings on the screen
- Updates and keeping your settings
- Guides and installation help
What you can configure
- Up to 48 tiles, spread across up to eight fixed pages of six tiles each (firmware 0.2.62+; twenty before). Search by entity, device, or room, and drag to reorder.
- Per-tile settings: a custom name, click behavior, a small slider where supported, or a large value for things like temperature and power usage. From firmware 0.2.13, the large value shows a small domain icon next to the title; a number that's too long is truncated with an ellipsis, the unit stays visible.
- Pastel backgrounds per tile: choose red for an all-off script, green for all-on, or any other color. The title and status stay dark and readable. The color also appears in the screen preview; Default restores the normal colors. Requires firmware 0.2.10 or newer. None drops the card entirely: the content then sits at the same size directly on the screen background (firmware 0.2.16).
- Clock: digital or analog. The analog clock has tick marks at 12, 3, 6, and 9 and, on a single tile, shows a calendar block (weekday, day, month) next to the dial; double-width shows the digital time with the date beside it.
- Light control: brightness, rainbow color, and white temperature according to the light's capabilities. Open the detailed control with a long touch.
- More cards: climate, vacuum, fan, cover, media player, sensors, select/input_select, number/input_number, switches, scenes, scripts, and buttons.
- Special cards (firmware 0.2.14+): a clock (digital or analog)
as a built-in tile, a weather forecast with five days on a
double-width card, a graph of the sensor history in the tile,
a sun path (
sun.sun: horizon with the sun between sunrise and sunset), a timer (timer.*, tapping starts or pauses it), and presence (person.*). Pick them in the library like any other tile, or drag them straight into the screen mockup; Double-width is an option for every tile, and so is Full page (firmware 0.2.62+): the tile takes the whole page and is one big button that lights up in its state colour while on, so a screen by the door switches the light when you push anywhere on it. Its small slider, direct controls or graph sit at the bottom of the page. A Go to page tile (screen.page_1toscreen.page_8) opens another page: a full-page light switch on page 1, a menu on page 2. Under Goes to page the editor offers the pages the screen has and the next, empty one, where a new sub-page starts. From firmware 0.2.65 the same page tile may sit on several pages of a screen, such as a tile back to the menu on every sub-page; older firmware takes each page tile once.
What a tile can do: keys and sliders on double-width tiles, previous and next for a choice, large values, small sliders, pastel colors, a clock and a timer.
Features depend on the capabilities Home Assistant reports for an entity. The app must keep running to keep the screens supplied with current data.
A short tap on a switch switches immediately; the off state gets a gray icon. A long press opens its history card with the toggle at the top right (firmware 0.2.51+). The tile shows the new state at once and Home Assistant's own report confirms it; a refusal puts the old state back. A spinner only appears when Home Assistant takes longer than about 0.4 seconds, and no wait lasts longer than three (firmware 0.2.59+). Tiles with a mini-slider keep their icon; on the CYD, the icon and text block are vertically centered.
Alert from an automation
Every screen has the action esphome.<screen>_show_alert (firmware 0.2.31+). It places
a card over the entire screen, wakes the screen, and keeps the backlight at normal
brightness until someone taps OK. In an automation:
action: esphome.kitchen_screen_show_alert
data:
title: "Someone is at the door"
subtitle: "Door 3, back"
icon: doorbell
color: orange
button_text: "Coming"
timeout: 0
flash: true
titleandsubtitle: a single-line title (truncated with an ellipsis if too long) and an explanation that wraps across multiple lines. Empty is allowed; an empty title becomes "Notification".icon: a name from the tile picker, such asdoorbell,bell,alert-outline,lock,door-open,motion-sensor,smoke-detector,water-alert,mailbox,car, oraccount.mdi:doorbelland the hex codepoint (F12E6) also work, as long as the glyph is included in the firmware. Unknown falls back to the warning triangle.color:red,orange,yellow,green,mint,blue,purple,pink, orgray— the same pastel shades as the tiles. Empty gives the white card.button_text: the text on the button; empty is "OK".timeout: seconds after which the card disappears on its own;0means it waits for the button, however long that takes. The button always closes the card immediately, even with a timeout. Standby and night mode wait as long as the card is showing.flash:truemakes the backlight blink four times when the alert arrives.
In ESP Screens, Alerts in the sidebar opens a cheatsheet with the exact action name for each screen,
a ready-to-paste example, and all fields, icons, and colors. Home Assistant asks for all seven fields; leave a field empty ("", 0, false) if you
don't use it. A new alert replaces the current one. Every end is reported as the event
esphome.screen_alert with action (ok, timeout, replaced, or remote), title,
screen, and the device_id that Home Assistant adds, so an automation can wait for OK.
esphome.<screen>_dismiss_alert clears the card remotely.
All screens at once
From app 0.2.45, one event reaches every screen that is online, screens you add later included.
ESP Screen Manager passes it on to each screen's show_alert action. The fields are the same;
the ones you leave out stay empty:
actions:
- event: esp_screens_show_alert
event_data:
title: "Mail!"
subtitle: "There is post in the mailbox"
icon: mailbox
color: orange
timeout: 0
flash: true
esp_screens_dismiss_alert clears the alert on every screen. The app has to be running
for these two events; the per-screen actions work without it.
With a camera picture
From app 0.2.66, the event takes one more field: camera, a camera.* or image.* entity.
A Guition with firmware 0.2.57+ shows that camera's picture of the moment across the top of the
card; a tap on it opens the camera full screen over the alert, and Back returns to the alert.
Other screens show the same alert without the picture. The per-screen actions have no camera
field.
actions:
- event: esp_screens_show_alert
event_data:
title: "Someone is at the door"
subtitle: "Front door"
icon: doorbell
color: orange
button_text: "Coming"
camera: camera.front_door
A camera or image entity also works as a tile on a Guition: a tap opens it full screen, refreshed every four seconds. How the image travels (port 8098 of the app, no token on the screen) is in docs/CAMERA.md.
Ask Claude
Use Claude Code in Home Assistant? Settings → Claude → Install for Claude Code writes an
ESP Screens skill to /homeassistant/.claude/skills/esp-screens, so Claude knows the events, the
tile settings and every field, color and icon. Then ask, for example: "Put the vacuum on the living
room screen", "Give the living room lights a brightness slider and make that tile wide", "Move the
vacuum to page 1" or "Show an alert on all my screens when the mailbox is full." Claude reads what a
screen shows from sensor.esp_screens_<screen> and asks before it changes anything. Download for
claude.ai gives the same skill as a zip to upload in Claude under Customize → Skills. Nothing is
written until you press the button.
Wake and sleep from an automation
Every screen has two buttons in Home Assistant (firmware 0.2.45+). An automation presses them
with the button.press action:
button.<screen>_wakelights the screen up: a screen in standby goes to its normal brightness (the second hand of an analog clock runs again), and the standby time starts counting again. On a screen that is already on, only the count starts again. Wake is not a touch: Back to page 1 keeps counting from the last touch, so pressing Wake on every motion doesn't keep an open card or a later page up, and a screen whose time ran out during standby lights up on page 1 (firmware 0.2.56+).button.<screen>_sleepputs the screen in standby right away, the same as when the standby time runs out, and also works with Auto standby off. The screen stays in standby until someone taps it, Wake is pressed or an alert comes in; switching Auto standby off doesn't end it. An alert that is showing closes (reported asremote).
Neither button saves anything on the screen, so an automation may press them as often as it likes, on every motion too. That is the difference with the Auto standby switch, which is a setting. To reach several screens at once, list their buttons:
actions:
- action: button.press
target:
entity_id:
- button.kitchen_screen_sleep
- button.living_room_screen_sleep
Don't target an area or a device with button.press: that presses every other button there too,
the Wake and Sleep of the same screen included.
Customizing tiles and colors
Click a tile in the screen preview. Under Pastel background, choose a color, such as red or green. Optionally adjust the name, click action, mini-slider, or large value. Click Save & send to apply the changes. After the first supporting firmware update, this requires no new flash.
The settings of the Curtains tile, and that tile on the screen: open, stop and close on the tile, and a tap on its name sets the curtains to 50 %.
A color is a fixed choice for that tile: it stays red, for example, even when you run the all-off script. The entity status and action feedback stay separately visible.
Top bar
At the top of the editor, each screen has its Top bar: the name on the left, up to
six items on the right. ＋ Add offers the time, an analog clock, and the date (which
keep ticking on the screen itself, even without Home Assistant), suggestions from your own
home (temperature and power usage from the screen's room, the weather, how many people are home,
sunrise and sunset), and a search field for any entity, including a phone
(device_tracker), a lock, the alarm panel, or zone.home. Drag the items
to change their order; tap one to configure it:
- What to show: the state as Home Assistant writes it (21.3 °C, 65%, 1,249 W, Open/Closed, Home/Away, Armed away), or Last changed: "Just now", "5 min ago", "Yesterday". A timestamp sensor can also count forward ("In 2 hours").
- Icon: automatic, matching Home Assistant (an open door gets an open- door icon), a custom icon from the list, or no icon.
- Show: always, or only when active: the item only appears when it's on, open, home, or greater than 0. Handy for an open door or a running washing machine. Active items are colored like in Home Assistant (open door amber, alarm armed green, alarm triggered red).
The screen preview draws the bar with the same letters and rules as the screen: all values on one line with the name, icons aligned to digit height, equal spacing. If not everything fits next to the name, the name gets an ellipsis and the screen drops the leading items; the editor marks those with dashes. Until updated, older firmware shows only the name and the time (if that's in the bar).
Settings on the screen
Everything you would want to change while standing in front of the panel is on the screen itself (firmware 0.2.44+). Tiles, the top bar and the pages stay in ESP Screens, where you have a mouse.
Opening it: hold the top bar — the strip with the screen's name and the clock — until the
blue line along the top edge is full, about a second and a half. Letting go early cancels.
Rather have a button? Put the built-in Settings card on a page like any other tile. From
Home Assistant, esphome.<screen>_open_settings opens it too (page 0 menu, 1 Brightness,
2 Night, 3 Screen, 4 This screen, -1 closes it).
| Group | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Brightness | Brightness, Dark mode, Auto standby, Standby after, Standby brightness |
| Night | Night mode, Starts, Ends, Night brightness |
| Screen | 12/24-hour clock, back to page 1 by itself and after how long, also on standby, swiping between pages, rotation (boards that turn) |
| This screen | Name, IP address, firmware version, Home Assistant connected, Restart |
Tap a toggle to flip it, - and + to change a number or a time — hold them and a time walks
whole hours — and tap a chip like the clock to cycle it. Every change is saved on the screen,
takes effect at once, and appears in ESP Screens within a second, so both sides always show
the same value. The Screen settings cards in ESP Screens have the same rows.
In Home Assistant (firmware 0.2.49+), every setting is an entity on the screen's device, under
Configuration: number.<screen>_normal_brightness, switch.<screen>_night_mode,
time.<screen>_night_starts, switch.<screen>_24_hour_clock, select.<screen>_rotation on a
Guition, and the rest. An automation, the settings page and ESP Screens all change the same value,
and setting a value the screen already has costs nothing. The full list is in
docs/SETTINGS.md.
Updates and keeping your settings
| Change | Action |
|---|---|
| Tiles, names, colors, or order | Save in ESP Screens; no firmware flash |
| Screen settings | Change them in ESP Screens (they apply at once), on the screen, or on their entities in Home Assistant |
| New version of the management page | Update ESP Screen Manager in the HA App store |
| New feature on the physical screen | The Update button on the screen (badge Update x.y.z), or Update automatically every night under Settings |
| Your own YAML for one screen | Override YAML in ESP Screens; kept through updates (app 0.2.61) |
Every app version belongs to one firmware version. After an app update, the list shows per screen whether newer firmware is available. Update builds that screen's own profile with the built-in CLI, installs it wirelessly, and waits until the screen is back. With the checkbox enabled, that happens automatically at night, one screen at a time; a failure stops the round and posts a notification in Home Assistant. Firmware 0.2.17+ reports its own device name and IP address for this; an older screen asks for the IP address once. You can still do it manually via Firmware & USB in the sidebar → Wi-Fi / OTA.
The device's own YAML and Wi-Fi/API/OTA settings stay in the ESPHome config folder. Tile layouts and options live in the app's persistent data. CYD calibration and screen preferences stay stored on the device. Updates don't replace this user data. Do still make normal Home Assistant backups and keep your device profiles; removing an app or wiping flash memory is not an update.
Your own YAML for one screen (app 0.2.61). Override YAML in ESP Screens edits a small
<screen>.local.yaml beside the screen's profile, for hardware-specific changes such as another
display controller. It is loaded after the shared board package and stays in place when the app or
the firmware package updates. The screen's name, Wi-Fi, API, OTA, packages, external components and
captive portal stay managed and are refused there. Save & check runs ESPHome's full validation
of the complete profile, and a build never starts from an invalid one.
Efficient, even with many screens (0.2.39 / firmware 0.2.33). The app sends a
screen only the tile that changed, as a single action
(esphome.<device_name>_screen_message) instead of chunks in a text field.
Every two minutes, a small ping follows with the layout revision; if the
screen reports that it doesn't match (after a restart, for example), everything is resent.
Firmware 0.2.49+ answers that ping, and a new layout, directly, so a screen that still
lacks a tile gets it again after 30 seconds instead of two minutes.
Graphs on sensor tiles come from Home Assistant's statistics, in one
query for all screens. Older firmware still works via the text field and the
full resend every two minutes. The diagnostic sensor Uptime has been
replaced by the Last boot timestamp.
See the release history and releases and protocol compatibility.
If you publish your own fork: every push to GitHub is a release. Always also
bump the add-on version in screen_manager/config.yaml and log the change in
the CHANGELOG, otherwise the HA App store won't offer an update. A change to the
screen also gets a new SCREEN_FIRMWARE_VERSION in both board profiles.
Guides and installation help
- Complete installation from ESP Screens
- Guition hardware, mounting, and rotation
- CYD calibration and USB diagnostics
- Instructions for developers and LLMs
Give a developer or LLM a clean copy of this repository and, for example:
Read AGENTS.md, README.md, and docs/EASY_SETUP.md. Help me install this CYD or Guition screen via USB on my Home Assistant. Identify the board and use my existing profile if one already exists. Guide me through calibration, HA pairing, tile selection, and physical tests. Keep keys local, and state which checks were actually carried out.
A successful build doesn't prove the physical touch or panel image is correct. The owner must check the display and perform the requested taps.