If anyone’s been thinking about a Tessera display in ESPHome (Home Assistant) – supported choices in the larger display sizes are limited. One supported screen is Seeed’s D1001 – and it’s very nice.
See below – my D1001-based Tessera panel up to now.. note that the weather, map and calendar panels open on touch to their own full screens.
Support for the D1001 is described in the Tessera control panel as “experimental” but up to now, it works just as well as my Guition 4″ displays which are also very nice – but you can’t get away from them being only 4″.
I also looked at a 10.1″ display by Elecrow but that’s not quite ready for prime-time yet. The “experimental” label on the Seeed display for the D1001 had me concerned initially but as you’ll see in the image above – up to now I’m having no issues apart from the map tile which is unreliable (seemingly only on the D1001) – I just checked on my 4″ Guition display – added the map tile – perfect – expansion – perfect – but not on the D1001 – I’ve reported that back to Tessera….the map worked just before I started doing this writeup.. and then worked again just after my last check – oh, here it is..
Next time I tried – nothing. That’s the only tile up to now that doesn’t seem to work properly.
Meanwhile I can’t seem to find a Tessera option to directly screengrab but here’s a screen capture from the editor after removing the map.
It is worth noting that when adding the Seeed unit, it dropped straight in and tiles worked straight away but when I went to add extra WiFi SSIDs – dopping into ESPHOME to make the change – I came across an error which stopped the compile – my mmediate thoughtswere that it must be the new display – it turns out that was NOT the case – Tessera is particularly resource-hungry when compiling and I have a Mini-PC running Home Assistant (HASS) natively) with 8K of RAM and though at one time this would have been EASILY enough RAM, once you start bringing in all kinds of APPS (add-ons) for AI and cameras etc. to Home Assistant, 8GB is starting to be a bit of a limit – nothing to do with the D1001 specifically. As the code was compiling – I saw something about only using only 2 simultaneous compilers due to only 2.3GB being available….then it bombed. None of this has anything to do with me using the D1001 display.
Anyway, simple solution, I temporarily turned off some apps that I’m not using right now, like Code Assistant and one of my camera enhancement apps, and that freed up more memory. The next time I compiled the 1001 display, no problem.
The 5-column setup I’m using on the D1001 display is just fine for big thumbs – could possibly squeeze 6 columns in – all configurable in Tessera. Of course, I’ve yet to try to make use of the many additional features of the D1001 display – (the antenna connector is for 4G and figure out what the antenna and there’s a 4G SIM socket but the actual 4G is described as optional and I don;t have one so no comment). There’s a micro-SD socket (I could envision offline photo albums), dual microphones, the unit has a 2500mAH USB-rechargeable battery (right now I’m just running on USB power), speaker and I’ve already spotted positional sensors in there (in the factory demo) – so much to play with, so little time…