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NsPanel Lovelace UI is a Firmware for the nextion screen inside of NSPanel in the Design of HomeAssistant's Lovelace UI Design.
- Entities Page with support for cover, switch, input_boolean, sensor, button, input_button and light
- Detail Pages for Lights (Brightness and Temperature of the Light) and for Covers (Position)
- Thermostat Page
- Media Player Card
- Screensaver Page with Time, Date and Weather Information
It works with Tasmota and MQTT. To control the panel and update it with content from HomeAssistant there is an AppDaemon App.
See the following picture to get an idea of the look of this firmware for NSPanel.
- Install Tasmota to NSPanel
- Install Berry Driver in Tasmota and setup MQTT
- Flash Nextion Firmware
- Install AppDaemon, setup MQTT and install Backend Application
For more detailed Instructions see the following Sections:
The NSPanel has two components an esp32 which runs Tasmota in this project and the nextion display, which is controlled by the esp32 via serial. This project contains a display firmware, which can be controlled over serial/mqtt. It's controlled by an AppDaemon Application, which crafts the required commands from your HomeAssistant Instance.
For more details on how the display firmware works see the README File in the HMI Folder
- NSPanel
- USB to Serial TTL Adapter
- Running Home Assistant Instance
- Installed MQTT Broker alongside Homeassistant
The recommended backend application for this firmware is written in a python for AppDaemon. This means it requires a working and running version of AppDaemon.
The easiest way to install it is through Home Assistant's Supervisor Add-on Store, it will be automaticly connected to your Home Assistant Instance.
You will need a way to edit the apps.yaml
config file in the Appdaemon folder.
Install Studio Code Server from Home Assistant's Supervisor Add-on Store to easily edit configuration Files on your HomeAssistant Instance.
HACS is the Home Assistant Community Store and allows for community integrations and automations to be updated cleanly and easily from the Home Assistant web user interface. It's simple to install the AppDaemon app without HACS, but keeping up to date requires manual steps that HACS will handle for you: you will be notified of updates, and they can be installed by a click on a button.
If you want to use HACS, you will have to follow their documentation on how to install HACS.
To install Lovelace UI Backend App with HACS, you will need to make sure that you enabled AppDaemon automations in HACS, as these are not enabled by default:
- Click on
Configuration
on the left menu bar in Home Assistant Web UI - Select
Devices & Services
- Select
Integrations
- Find
HACS
and click onConfigure
- In the window that opens, make sure that
Enable AppDaemon apps discovery & tracking
is checked, or check it and clickSubmit
- If you just enabled this (or just installed HACS), you might have to wait a few minutes as all repositories are being fetched; you might hit a GitHub rate limit, which might then require you to wait a few hours for HACS to be fully configured. In this case, you won't be able to proceed to the next steps until HACS is ready.
Now, to install NSPanel Lovelace UI Backend with HACS, follow these steps:
- Click on
HACS
on the left menu bar in Home Assistant Web UI - Click on
Automations
in the right panel - Click on
Explore & download repositories
in the bottom right corner - Search for
NSPanel
, and click onNSPanel Lovelace UI Backend
in the list that appears - In the bottom right corner of the panel that appears, click on
Download this repository with HACS
- A confirmation panel will appear, click on
Download
, and wait for HACS to proceed with the download - The Backend Application is now installed, and HACS will inform you when updates are available
Installing the Backend Application manually can be summarized by putting the content of the
apps/
directory of this repository (the nspanel-lovelace-ui/
directory) into the apps/
directory of your AppDaemon installation.
This section describes how to free your nspanel from stock firmware and get it ready for Lovelace UI 🎉
You need to connect to your nspanel via serial and flash the tasmota32-nspanel.bin to your NSPanel. Make sure to come back to this guide, before uploading the nspanel.be/autoexec.be files. For more deatils see the NSPanel Page of the Tasmota Template Repository.
Configure the NSPanel template for Tasmota. (Go to Configuration and Configure Other and paste the template there, make sure to tick the activate checkbox)
You can use the following template or copy the one on the Tasmota Template Repo Site.
{"NAME":"NSPanel","GPIO":[0,0,0,0,3872,0,0,0,0,0,32,0,0,0,0,225,0,480,224,1,0,0,0,33,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,4736,0],"FLAG":0,"BASE":1,"CMND":"ADCParam 2,11200,10000,3950 | Sleep 0 | BuzzerPWM 1"}
After a reboot of tasmota your screen will light up with the stock display firmware.
Configure your MQTT Server in Tasmota. See Tasmota MQTT Documentation for more details.
-
Download the autoexec.be berry driver from the latest release. (Development Version Berry Driver from this Repository)
-
Go to
Consoles
>Manage File System
in Tasmota and upload the previously downloaded file. -
Restart your NSPanel
Upload the nspanel.tft from the lastest release to a Webserver (for example www folder of Home Assistant) and execute the following command in Tasmota Console. (Development Version: tft file from HMI folder)
Webserver needs to support HTTP Range Header Requests, python2/3 http server doesn't work
Webserver must be HTTP, HTTPS is not supported, due to limitations of berry lang on tasmota
FlashNextion http://ip-address-of-your-homeassistant:8123/local/nspanel.tft
Due the limitations of Berry, it's not possible to download the tft file directly from github, so I'm also renting a small server where you can download the file via HTTP.
The following Link has always the latest version from this repository, just execute the following Command in Tasmota:
FlashNextion http://nspanel.pky.eu/lui.tft
For the app to work you need a working MQTT Configuration in AppDaemon. Please add the configuration of your mqtt server, user and password to your existing appdaemon.yaml
---
secrets: /config/secrets.yaml
appdaemon:
latitude: 52.0
longitude: 4.0
elevation: 2
time_zone: Europe/Berlin
plugins:
HASS:
type: hass
MQTT:
type: mqtt
namespace: mqtt
client_id: "appdaemon"
client_host: 192.168.75.30
client_port: 1883
client_user: "mqttuser"
client_password: "mqttpassword"
client_topics: NONE
http:
url: http://127.0.0.1:5050
admin:
api:
hadashboard:
Please see appdaemon.yaml as an exmaple.
Confiure your NSPanel as you like, you need to edit the apps.yaml
inside of your Appdaemon config folder.
You can have multiple nspanel sections.
nspanel-1:
module: nspanel-lovelace-ui
class: NsPanelLovelaceUIManager
config:
panelRecvTopic: "tele/tasmota_your_mqtt_topic/RESULT"
panelSendTopic: "cmnd/tasmota_your_mqtt_topic/CustomSend"
timeoutScreensaver: 15 #in seconds, values between 5 and 60 are allowed
#brightnessScreensaver: 10
brightnessScreensaver:
- time: "7:00:00"
value: 10
- time: "23:00:00"
value: 0
locale: "de_DE"
timeFormat: "%H:%M"
dateFormat: "%A, %d. %B %Y"
weatherEntity: weather.example
pages:
- type: cardEntities
heading: Example Page 1
items:
- cover.example_cover
- switch.example_switch
- input_boolean.example_input_boolean
- sensor.example_sensor
- type: cardEntities
heading: Example Page 2
items:
- button.example_button
- input_button.example_input_button
- light.light_example
- delete # To make sure we don't keep buttons from previous page (read this as 'empty')
- type: cardEntities
heading: Example Page 3
items:
- scene.some_scene
- scene.moodlights
- delete
- delete
- type: cardThermo
heading: Exmaple Thermostat
item: climate.example_climate
- type: cardMedia
heading: Exampe Media
item: media_player.spotify_user
key | optional | type | default | description |
---|---|---|---|---|
module |
False | string | The module name of the app. | |
class |
False | string | The name of the Class. | |
config |
False | complex | Config/Mapping between Homeassistant and your NsPanel |
Updating involves mainly already descriped steps from installation, so this is a short summary.
This project has three main parts, on a new release you usally need to update at least two of them, the AppDaemon Backend and the firmware of the display. Sometimes there are also changes to the berry driver script on tasmota.
Note the commands in the following section will update to the current development version of this repository, use the command from release page if you want to use a release version
HACS will show you that there is an update avalible and ask you to update.
Use the following command to update or use your own webserver. FlashNextionFast will use Nextion Upload Protocol 1.2 and try to skip unchanged parts of the firmware.
FlashNextionFast http://nspanel.pky.eu/lui.tft
In case this Update failes, reboot tasmota and use the following command:
FlashNextion http://nspanel.pky.eu/lui.tft
Since release 1.1 you can update the berry driver directly from the Tasmota Console with the following command.
UpdateDriverVersion https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joBr99/nspanel-lovelace-ui/main/tasmota/autoexec.be
- Make sure to use the tasmota32-nspanel.bin Tasmota build.
- Make sure to use an WebServer which supports http range requests like HomeAssistant, apache2 or nginx for exmaple.
- Make sure to use HTTP and not HTTPS
Try to send the FlashNextion command a second time.
Reboot Tasmota and try to flash it a second time.
Please check your MQTT Topics in your apps.yaml and your mqtt configuration on tasmota.