Universal ESP/Raspberry display for the smart home

I want to make my own thermostats to control the floor electroswitch. I've come up with this to be on an ESP 8266, and I've bought a Shelly 2.5 treating it as hardware. Thinking in the old fashioned way I would like to have some sort of one/two display in the house that would show the current temperatures, maybe also the set points and some sort of buttons/encoder that would allow householders unfamiliar with Android apps to increase/decrease the temperature.

Has anyone seen that maybe some Chinese manufacture a 5-10 inch display that has ESP on the back, nice casing, looks aesthetically pleasing, can be easily programmed and will look like it came from the factory?

It is unlikely that I have come across any. The closest to your requirements are Nextion displays.
However, quite expensive so it's better to just use some cheap tablet.

JanuszKornas wrote:

a 5-10 inch display that has an ESP on the back

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How about buying a display with a front bezel, with an FT8xx controller that is controlled via SPI and connect the ESP to it yourself.

There are 5" displays from Riverdi in the form of panels with ESP32 chip: Link . Available in Poland.

I have a similar dilemma with a display, I'm looking for something that was ready made, nice to mount on the wall and reasonably easily repairable. Unfortunately the lifespan declared by the manufacturer is only of the order of 1-2 years. After this time the complete display may not be commercially available, so I would prefer if the matrix or backlight itself could be replaced like a typical HD44780 clone display. For the project I unfortunately need a touch matrix to simulate a numeric keypad on the screen.

Espressif recently announced the availability of an evaluation board called ESP32-S2-HMI-DevKit-1 with 480×800 display and touch support.
https://github.com/espressif/esp-dev-kits/tree/master/esp32-s2-hmi-devkit-1

To the Nextion, just connect the ESP over Serial and you're done. You can even make a TCP/Serial bridge on the ESP and send data to the LCD wirelessly. The price difference between the Nextion and the FT8xx is not much, and in the Nextion you have an additional uC which can be easily programmed to handle it without the need for an ESP, and a simple connection (Rx and Tx) and simple data sending over Serial.

I have a Nextion 7" 800x480 for home automation and the main screen looks like this :

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And this is how it looks in the interface design software :

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I bought from elty.pl
You have a version right away with an enclosure https://elty.pl/pl/p/-Wyswietlacz-Nextion-Enh...ezystancyjny-panel-dotykowy-oraz-obudowa/2019 - I made my own.
Here you have without the casing cheaper https://elty.pl/pl/p/Wyswietlacz-Nextion-Basi...-NX8048T070-rezystancyjny-panel-dotykowy/1625

Best regards

I propose another solution - an unused tablet with a TFT matrix. For this you need to buy a case and take it apart so that only the plastic frame remains. The frame is screwed to the wall and the tablet is put into the frame. We install Chrome on the tablet and connect to our web server which is the intermediary with the other ESPs. This could be a PC, Pi or something else. The application is written in HTML+javascript, and on the server side it's whatever you like (I have PHP). When you open the page, Chrome has a cool option - pin the page to the start screen. The cumbersome address bar then disappears, and everything looks like an app. This solution also has the advantage that changing the application is simply changing the web page, and on the tablet you close the page and reopen it.
I currently have 2 tablets - one in the hallway showing all the functions and one in the bedroom showing the time, outside and inside temperature and data from Google's RSS feed.
A larger smartphone can be used instead of the tablet, but better without the OLED matrix (it doesn't like the long display).
The whole thing works well, although the app (which is basically Chrome) can shut down once every few weeks. This is not a problem, just click on the icon that is pulled out.

Thanks for the tips, but unfortunately they don't solve the problem of aging equipment that is supposed to work 24/7. In tablets/phones, batteries wear out, batteries swell, the micro-usb power cable looks bad. In Nextion or 4D Systems products, the display also has a finite life, the manufacturer guarantees a drop of up to 50% brightness in a year or two. Some manufacturers guarantee the availability of the hardware for a few years, but then what? You have to do an overhaul because the flush-mounted display box doesn't fit the new display?

Ondo wrote:

Thanks for the tips, but unfortunately they don't solve the problem of aging equipment that is supposed to work 24/7. Tablets/phones wear out, batteries swell, the micro-usb power cable looks bad.

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So I suggest that you dispense with the incorporation of a TFT display at all and stay with simple signalling, e.g. on LEDs. On the other hand, transfer all visualisation functionality of the device's operation to a mobile phone/tablet etc., via Wi-Fi.

Ondo wrote:

It is necessary to do an overhaul because the flush-mounted display box does not fit under the new display?

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And you won't need to do an overhaul .

JanuszKornas wrote:

Has anyone seen that maybe some Chinese manufacture a 5-10 inch display that has ESP on the back, a nice casing, looks aesthetically pleasing, can be easily programmed and will look like it came from the factory?

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I don't quite understand you - do you think that if you buy something like this it will work for years, while a Lenovo or Samsung tablet will "die" after a year? I'm afraid it will be exactly the opposite. It's not from today that electronic photo frames are produced that work 24 hours. Of course, these should not be products with an OLED matrix - there such an effect can occur. The batteries work properly, although their capacity may drop when in a constant state of charge. However, this is not a problem - the system is non-stop powered from the mains. I have never had a tablet or phone battery swell.
I have one of my tablets with the screen off. It is woken up by the PIR detector from the alarm. Waking it up is simple - I cut the power to it for a while and switch it on - then the tablet wakes up. This unfortunately gives a delay of 2-3s.

I don't really understand, I haven't seen a home automation screen that shines at full brightness 24 hours a day. It would be impossible to sleep at night with something like that, so usually the screen either wakes up with a touch or automatically dims/brights up based on a light sensor or with the help of an astronomical clock. I think the author's colleague is somewhat artificially building a problem that doesn't exist.
Also, there is no device that will work indefinitely without a battery or mains supply, so your criteria are rather impossible to meet in the current state of technology.

Best regards

krzbor wrote:

I don't really understand you - you think that if you buy something like this, it will work for years, while a Lenovo or Samsung tablet will "die" after a year?

It's not supposed to last forever, but as I wrote above, the display or backlight should be easily "repairable" by replacing a component that is relatively cheap and readily available.

Slawek K. wrote:

I don't really understand, I haven't seen a home automation screen that shines full brightness around the clock. At night you wouldn't be able to sleep with something like that, so usually the screen either wakes up with a touch or automatically dims/brights up based on the light sensor or using an astronomical clock.

Nhere did I say that the display should be at maximum brightness 24/7, but dimming at night is not something that will significantly increase the operating time. I expect my screen to be readable 24/7 and if I want to check the temperature I won't have to press buttons on the panel to turn the display on.

So cheers to you finding something that meets your expectations. Share the information on how you find it, I'd love to use it.

Best regards

Nextion is cool but unfortunately expensive I used a 2.4inch a few years ago to control among other servos.
When I moved everything to ha it stopped making sense.