Hello, I am new here, so apologies if this isn’t the right category for my question.
I am looking to build a sort of wall display/physical dashboard for Home Assistant that will primarily act as a thermostat but to be able to switch to a dashboard for interfacing with HA.
So the rough plan was to get a pi zero and one of these 4" 720x720 square touch screen displays.
Also I would connect a temperature sensor and a relay to the pi’s gpio so it could actually switch on the heating.
I am pretty clear on the hardware side of this, but my question is how can I set up the software side of things? If it was just a wall display I could easily setup a kiosk and make it display the HA web interface, but I am looking to integrate the temp sensor and relay similarly how you get sensor data in HA from your phone with the HA app.
Hmmm, It doesn’t inspire confidence that it’s listed as a legacy integration and it looks like not many people are using it.
I was considering an esp based solution but I am worried about responsiveness, and then I would also need to code the whole interface and I couldn’t just use HA’s interface.
Does the high level design have HA in the middle of HVAC mode or Heat call settings? Will the display always be a Lovelace dashboard? If so, what if HA dies, gets rebooted and/or and upgrade deprecates something important or it doesn’t restart? How is control of the HVAC system maintained? It might depend where you live, here at latitude 42 north, the heat not working would be problematic.
I’m considering a wall unit but looking to use the built Lovelace thermostat control to talk to my ecobee thermostat. Ecobee’s service has a detailed web page that could be called up on the wall unit as well.
I live around the 45th parallel north, in a pretty well insulated house. We only see less than -10°C once every ~5 years. We had the heat go out once when it was -15°C outside and inside it was around 11°C so not really in danger of pipes bursting or something like that, but those temperatures are extremely rare.
Also I was planing to build these thermostats for implementing zoned heating, if something were to happen with HA or the thermostats I would switch to the old system where one dumb thermostat controlled the whole house heating via a manual override.
Yes, it would be ideal if the thermostat function (turning on the relay when the temperature is below the set point) was handled on the pi itself and HA just controls the set point, but that’s a part of the software I started this thread asking about.
This looks like a nice project, the performance is as expected, not great, not terrible. But this doesn’t implement the thermostat function like I’ve mentioned in my reply above to Paul, just a dashboard. It would be the same if I just built a display with a pi, but the pi based one would probably be more responsive.
A raspberry pi will not be any more responsive than an esp device, an Esphome device does not need HA to work and Esphome can even generate its own web page.
And esphome devices are really very stable, never need updating allow you have that option if you want it.
If I go with the “generic thermostat” option it still has the problem that the heating calls are handled by HA, which is ok but not ideal.
The ESP-Home route is good, but it seems absurd to use another device if the wall display has a pi that is perfectly capable of reading a temp sensor and controlling a relay.
What I am looking for is something that combines ESP-Home and a dashboard. Similarly how on the HA android app you can interact with Home Assistant and you also get the phone’s sensor data in HA. But it looks like the software support for that is just not there.
I might just build a simple pi based wall display and run a small script on the pi that receives the temperature set point over MQTT and controls the relay accordingly.
The device I posted DOES all that.
It has a relay, it has an interface and a screen.
I believe it also has a temp sensor, but not sure. It could be some other similar that has it.
I was referring to the display responsiveness of an esp based wall dashboard, not esphome. Esphome is a great piece of software that I’ve used for many projects already and it works very reliably in my experience.
Yes, I see that. But the software you posted (Remote WebView) DOES NOT do what I need. The hardware is the easy part, the software is where it gets tricky, that’s why I started this thread.
