E-paper display

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61

There is a chrony addon.

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For anyone interested, the 4.2 inch case (pictured a few posts up) is now on Thingiverse to print:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4721366

Andy

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Dose anyone managed to user sensors platform: homeassistant with deep_sleep: ?

I want to use my display from battery, but without deep sleep it runs out in one day. With deep sleep, ESP32 dose not receive changes from Home Assistant, because they happened during sleep.

Are only solution would be, to use platform: mqtt_subscribe instead of platform: homeassistant and send each message manually from HA?

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  1. Do those e-paper displays have an WiFi to connect to HASS RPi to get data?
  2. What about their power usage in such WiFi mode? How often do you have to change the batteries?

Thank you!

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No they do not have wifi.

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So what’s that?.. Is it an extra WiFi module that you attach to those displays?

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It is the esphome configuration for an attached esp8266 or esp32.

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Dose anyone managed to user sensors platform: homeassistant with deep_sleep: ?

Did you check the link in the first post: home assistant prepares bmp images, esp reads them when waking up?
http://users.telenet.be/goosst/posts/homeautomation_epaper_gen/#different-steps

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This page have only scheme, but no code.
I didn’t really understand, in which direction I should read this. Looks like “newer” and “older” on the bottom of the page leads to different articles. In them I found about MQTT and writing ESP code from scratch. Nothing about ESPhome and integration platform: homeassistant into it.

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I think there are a number of different projects here. @goosst does not use esphome.

If you want to use esphome then there are several other examples in this thread.

For your specific query, post your MQTT message with retain set, and it will still be there when the esp wakes from deep sleep.

EDIT if I wasn’t clear, you can use platform: homeassistant with mqtt (on my reading of the docs)

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But how? I never found anything about that anywhere. Everywhere is written to use MQTT instead of api: <key> And if I am using MQTT I will be unable to fetch data from sensors automatically just by using entity_id from Home Assistant.

I totally understand that it can be done manually. I need to create MQTT message for each sensor, and send them each time value is changed. But it it is big hassle, when ESPhome already have homeassistant platform integration.

I just wander if there is a way to retain messages using ESPhome provided Home Assistant integration.

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I assume from the docs because this Home Assistant Sensor — ESPHome says

All other options from Sensor

Sensor says

MQTT Options:

  • expire_after ( Optional , Time): Manually set the time in which the sensor values should be marked as “expired”/“unknown”. Not providing any value means no expiry.
  • All other options from MQTT Component.
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I just received a Lyligo T5-4.7 e-paper display module, which should be ideal for us here because it has great characteristics (4.7inch, 960*540, 16 gray level, partial refresh, integrated ESP32) at an amazing price (30$ approx on AliExpress). Now the problem : the only provided demo is based on Arduino IDE and extremely limited - just displaying text and images, not even wifi-enabled. Arduino IDE is a bit of a pain compared to Raspberry Pi or ESPHome devs. Do you know if ESPHome has plans to integrate this soon? Any experience developping displays on Arduino IDE?

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ESPhome has feature requests section in its issues tracker on github.

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Yes I added that request there as well.
First of all let me present a bit what I am doing so far, and then why this new hardware is absolutely great for my usage - and probably for the usage of almost everyone here.
I am using so far various epaper displays, from 2.13inch to 7.5 inch to display various things in my HA : temperatures, power consumptions, state of various devices as well as financial (currencies, stocks etc) that I get in HA via Yahoofinance.
So far I have used ESPHome to display values (like a lot of examples above, it is fairly easy to do by extracting sensor values from HA to ESPHome and displaying them nicely) - you then need an ESP32 and a Waveshare display. The “good” ones are the one that allow for partial refresh, because it is a lot nicer.
The second thing I have used so far, to display number and graphics is putting a Waveshare display on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which then allows for more complex tasks. My main usage for this is coupled with 3.7inch Waveshare display with HAT. On Raspberry Pi, you can use Python and scripts which is a lot simpler and more flexible. My implementation uses a script to download graphics at the right size every 5 minutes, and then a python program to (transform and) display the downloaded image as well as the curent value of a sensor with partial refresh. The original graphics comes out of a Grafana dashboard. So for example : I have a current power consumption sensor for my house. I graph this in Grafana over a period of 24h. I can now display the 24h graph as well as the instant value in a very nice way on my 3.7inch display.
The first way, EspHome, is limited because you can’t easily display graphs and the waveshare support is really partial - for example you can’t get those new 3.7 inches display there, it doesn’t support partial update on many screens etc. You can display on 2 screens max from 1 ESP32. Price for 2 2.9inch screens all in : 50$
The second way, RbPi, is a lot more powerful but quite expensive and more power-intensive. You need a RbPi 0 W + the screen, you can only do 1 screen with 1 RbPi. Price with 3.7inch screen all in : 60$
And now comes the Lilygo that gives you ESP32 + a superior 4.7 screen for 25$ - if we can integrate this with HA in 1 way or the other, this will beat hands down every solutions we have so far…

Hence why I am excited and mentioning this here as well, in case some here after better experience and skills than myself on using Arduino IDE to integrate things with HA - because EspHome is not the only way to make those things work, and even if on one side it is nicely integrated, it is also fairly limited in display management.

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@goost’s method of generating a pic then uploading that seems quite good for your purpose.

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So, I tested your theory, and it is not working at all. Since platform: homeassistant uses native API, but not MQTT, expire_after does nothing. Even with MQTT configured in ESPhome, you still need to send manually each sensor, and do not use platform: homeassistant for display to work with deep_sleep.

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These displays look great, but every time I see a project like this tagged under Home Automation this it makes me wonder if there is not something more useful we could be doing with them vs displaying weather, time or headlines.

Home Automation is all about taking action based on one or multiple events and being able to remotely control a device. Is Home Assistant capturing any data that can be useful to display in a meaningful way?

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  • Consumption
    • Electricity
    • Water
    • etc
  • Presence detection (is family member at work? in school? etc) (Weasley Clock from Harry Potter)
  • Door/Window opened sensors (in big house can be usefull)
  • Shoping/ToDo list
  • Battery alerts for your devices
  • Anything what you need. For example, I want to see, how much time I am spending watching TV, to be more productive.

You can display anything you need. Only question is: What do you need?

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I understand the possibilities, what I was trying to convey is that a dedicated display is typically only ever used for displaying weather or temperature information, not some of things you suggest. I suspect that’s because the examples shown have no or limited ability to interact with it.

I have a tablet in the front hall which I use to disable the alarm when we are out. It can display other things such as weather or the Home Assistant dashboard but we never use that feature.

Perhaps the idea of doing a display has more appeal than the actual utility of it. Just thinking out loud.