I built a new custom integration for Home Assistant: PANDA ESL.
I started this because I was looking for a small e-ink display that would be as cheap as possible, but still easy to integrate with Home Assistant. I wanted something simple and plug-and-play: no special hub, no opening the device, no soldering, and no custom ESP32 firmware.
These PANDA / ETAG electronic shelf labels seemed like a good fit, so I created an integration for them.
The integration works over Bluetooth / BLE. A Bluetooth proxy is recommended, especially if the labels are not close to your Home Assistant server, but other than that no special hardware is needed.
Repo:
https://github.com/moryoav/ha-panda
Confirmed working product and more detailed information:
The label I tested is a 2.13" e-paper display, with 256x128 resolution and three colors: white, black, and red.
There are already other Home Assistant integrations for other ESL / e-paper labels, but these devices don’t all use one shared standard. Different brands often use different protocols, so this integration is specifically for the PANDA / ETAG BLE labels that advertise as ETAG-*.
At home, I think these labels can be useful as small low-power displays for things like weather, the next calendar event, shopping lists, pantry labels, room or door status, sensor values, battery status, QR codes for guests, or simple reminders near the door, fridge, desk, or coffee machine.
The integration writes locally over BLE, without any cloud service. It supports HACS as a custom repository, has a UI config flow, provides a panda_esl.write service, creates a preview image entity before writing, and includes a write progress sensor. It can render text, shapes, icons, QR codes, barcodes, tables, plots, gauges, progress bars, and more.
Example screens:
The integration is still new, so feedback, testing, ideas, and contributions are very welcome.