As I have mentioned previously I have been been gradually Home Assistant-ifying my home. Of course, part of that means having a some control panels around. I have tried an old tablet, but was not really happy with the results. At some point I leaned about the so-called “Cheap Yellow Display” (CYD). This is a small TFT display bolted directly to an ESP32 microcontroller.

There are a few things that make this interesting:

• ESPHome support: This means it is very easy to integrate into Home Assistant.
• LVLGL support: This is a powerful graphics library that allows for complex user interfaces.
• Cheap: You can get one for about 10-15 euros.

I ordered one from AliExpress without really knowing much about it and decided I would just roll with any problems that came up. As is often the case with AliExpress, the first problem was identifying exactly what arrived. I ordered a “Freenove Bitcoin Miner NMMiner NerdMinder … something something CYD ESP32 Something”. What I got was a small yellow PCB with a ILI9341 TN TFT display on one side, and an ESP32 on the other with a bunch of other stuff:

• A microSD card slot
• A battery connector
• A couple of buttons
• A few headers for GPIO access

After some searching I found out that this was indeed a CYD board, specifically this one. So now I had it, I need to figure out what to use it for to start with. Anything for my office has a much standard of Wife Acceptance Factor, so I decided to start with a control panel for my office temperature. This is already controlled using Home Assistant using a few things:

• Target temperature is variable based on presence and time of day/week
• Current temperature is from a Dallas temperature sensor (DS18B20) that sits on my desk - still in a breadboard naturally.

I’ve recently decided to change my bike frame as I developed a tendonitis due to my beloved Felt F95 actually being too big. As we are also looking to buy a house, my budget was quite limited. This put a nice shiney Cannondale SystemSix well out of my reach, so I decided to give a Chinese frame a try.

This is not as shocking as it sounds because of the realities of the bike market.