Adafruit products rock!

Hardware
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This looks perfect, tho is out of stock.

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Just saw this display, looks perfects for projects like this alarm panel

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I got one of these as part of my AdaBox subscription and am now finally getting around to trying it out. The hardware itself is pretty nice although I haven’t done much yet with it. Haven’t tried the touch screen yet either. The PyPortal software that they tout is poorly documented and fairly limited from what I saw in the source. I’m abysmal at programming GUIs so I’m not sure what other options are out there. Two annoyances:

  • The USB MicroB socket sticks out the side so the it seems like the USB cable will be getting in the way.
  • The auto-reload feature sucks if your system is set up for write caching. I don’t know how many times I corrupted the filesystem before I figured out the magic incantations to turn that off. The documentation on that seems pretty poor as well.

That said, once I figure out a GUI library that will work with this thing, it could make a pretty decent remote controller for IoT things.

There’s no way Lovelace will run on this so it’ll need to be some custom code for interfacing with HASS.

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That’s a shame about the documentation. Tho the fact most ppl don’t use the librarys written by them for there own products kinda made me think they might be a little short on flesh

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@jcollie I would just write some micropython to display data sent over MQTT

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Well yeah. That’s the thing isn’t it… Gotta figure out how to display data before you can display data, which is where the GUI library comes in. The AdaFruit PyPortal seems pretty focused on displaying the results of a HTTP query in a pretty way. In any case, I want to do something a little more complex, basically I want to use the PyPortal as a mini remote sitting on the side table next to my recliner for turning the TV on/off, lights etc.

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Just received mine, and happy to find a tutuorial (and code) for interfacing with HA via MQTT: