Hey everyone,
on the surface this will really just be a rant, but “under the surface” I somehow also still hope I missed out on something and this will turn into a fruitful conversation that gives me a direction…
Anyway, let’s hit it: I’m using HA for a bit over a year now. My setup covers a whole bunch of software and hardware (zigbee, bluetooth, esp32 and esp8266 with esphome, environmental sensors, lights music/spotify, REST sensors, telegram remote access, automated backup to NAS, lambda, templating, custom cards …), and I certainly struggled to a certain degree with most of them. And while I in the end figured out all of it sooner or later, the one thing that repeatedly leaves me with frustration and wanting to throw things into a hole in the ground and burry it for good, is getting waveshare epaper/eink displays to work reliably with esphome.
I do have one 2.9inch display working kind-of-okay for half a year now (glitching unreproducable from time to time without log entries), failed with a 1.54, and now that I tried out the 7.5inch one I kind-of got it to work after buying the original waveshare esp32 board, mostly grainy, and after a week of operation the display doesnt react anymore.
While with most other topics I looked into I can find forum threads or youtube videos or blog post, with waveshare displays I again and again run into threads that end with “hey, did you get this to work afterall?” or github issue discussions that link to stale pull requests, or with a bit of luck that one post that lists the one working yaml config that somehow works in 85% of the cases when the moon is in the right quadrant.
User error and faulty displays can of course still be the reason, but I also ran into forums (here, reddit, …) where esp32/display combinations works fine with arduino code, but fail with presumably ready to run esphome code/configs.
I absolutely love the concept and user experience of epaper displays in general, but by now I more and more often think about switching more to led lights, phone notifications, or small servos that wave tiny physical flags at me when I walk through the hallway.
Damn, that felt good to write 