These look really nice to be used with HA to show a tiny dashboard/information.
I did a search on this forum but could not find anything (but perhaps my search string was not optimal). Does anyone know of any integration that will support these electronic price tag screens?
I am also looking for some small (preferable eInk displays) to show important information (water level of our well) in neuralgic spots (next to the shower, kitchen sink).
This one you linked looks nice is a TFT though. I am skeptical the labeld 2-3 years battery life are true.
Also the communication range is only 20 meters. I don’t think it will be even the half through some walls. On the other hand, they claim it’s WiFi. Which would things a bit easier.
I only recently noticed that my local ALDI use these tags, only because I saw one change while looking at it !
I can imagine all sorts of uses with HA for reminders or notifications around the house or shed if we could send data to these…
Exactly along the lines I wanted to use them… Our well doesn’t deliver enough water and we have to refill it every now and then.
Hence, showing the water level in our well, next to the bathroom sink and shower, prevents you from nasty surprises. Also next to the washing machine and the dishwasher…
I always forget to look onto the HA dashboard on my phone before taking a shower…
All of those tags are e-paper displays, not TFT. I use them for my custom sensors that require low update rate. Currently I am using waveshare but I used pervasive in the past.
I am looking into this as well. I work at home and would use this on my home office door to list out my meeting times so the family knows if I’ll be in a video conference.
OpenEpaperlink have developed a custom firmware and protocol for tags based on the ZBS243 chipset. You can pick up these tags second hand on eBay and other e-commerce sites. They mostly seem to come from the person who runs the OpenEpaperlink Discord channel. I picked up 50 of them a few months ago for around EUR120 including delivery to the UK.
OpenEPaperlink has a Home Assistant integration if you want to start quickly - it currently allows for up to 4 lines of easily legible text in landscape mode on a 2.9" display, or 8 lines of tiny text, although there’s a feature request planned for portrait mode too.
The integration accepts templating values so you can easily display the value of any sensor or sensor attribute. The displays are typically red, white and black, so you can highlight concerning values too.
That said, it’s not currently for the faint hearted (you’ll need to either solder some components to make an Access Point, or buy one pre-assembled for c. $40 plus delivery from the project’s creator on Tindie, or use an alternate radio stick and flash it with new firwmare, which will probably also require soldering or a special debug cable, and doesn’t currently have a HA integration).
You will also need to flash firmware to the tags themselves, or pay extra and buy them pre-flashed on Tindie in smaller quantities with your access points. This is trickier than it sounds as it involves either temporarily soldering to tiny contact points on the tags, and then flashing them use an ESP, or printing a 3D programming jig and using tiny “pogo” pins to poke through the holes in the 3D print into the right place on the tags. From experience, the holes are too small for most 3D print mediums, so some drilling is required (you can now also buy a PCB with the holes pre-drilled in exactly the right place).
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with OpenEPaperlink, but I have been enthusiastically dotting the displays around the house! I’m also a member of their thriving Discord community.
I’m ordering now! I can’t wait to receive them!
I’m going to use one of the 2.9" displays to show my guest WiFi SSID and voucher code. Each time we have guests to stay I generate a new voucher code for my guest WiFi network. I make it valid for 30 days.
Guests are told that their maximum stay is 30 days! I used to print this out onto paper each time the voucher changed but I won’t have to anymore!
I was wondering if this can also be easily integrated into an existing Zigbee2MQTT environment? I already have a Sonoff dongle that bridges directly into HA via MQTT and is working with various sensors.
Someone asked for it, but no response to the feature request.
Or is the OpenEPaperLink firmware using non-standard Zigbee features to make these labels work?
“If you just want to tinker with Thread or Zigbee instead, you can make this as a WiFi to Thread/Zigbee gateway, possibly use it together with Zigbee2mqtt. But no software is written for it yet, if you want to use it that way. Looking forward to see some nice implementations!”
