Every home automation enthusiast hits the same wall: the phone is in the other room, nobody else wants to install the app, and a wall-mounted tablet costs real money for a job that’s mostly “turn off the lights.” Tessera (formerly ESP Screens) takes a swing at that wall with small ESP32 touch panels — from a 2.8-inch CYD board to a 10.1-inch Guition — running firmware you flash once and then manage entirely from Home Assistant. No YAML. No MQTT. No tokens. I’ve been watching this category for a while, and this is the first approach that feels like it was designed by someone who actually lives with other people.
The problem it solves
The standard answers to “always-available home control” are all wrong in some way. A wall tablet is expensive, overpowered, needs a mount and a permanent power scheme, and half the time you end up babysitting its battery or its updates. A phone app is one unlock-gesture away from nothing. Cheap e-ink buttons handle exactly one thing. What most rooms actually need is a small, dumb, always-on surface with a handful of tiles: lights, heating, maybe the vacuum. That’s the whole spec, and Tessera nails it.
How it works
The project is two halves. The firmware side runs on the panel itself. The Home Assistant side is an app called ESP Screen Manager, which handles everything else: it flashes a new screen over USB, updates it over Wi-Fi afterwards, and pushes your tile layout to it. Layout is done in a drag-and-drop editor — pick a tile, drag it, hit Save & send. Changing a screen doesn’t mean reflashing it, and there’s no blueprint to wrangle.
Five panels are supported today: the 2.8-inch CYD, a 4-inch and a 10.1-inch Guition, and 4.3-inch and 7-inch Waveshare boards. The firmware measures its own canvas at boot and lays out pages to fit — around six tiles on the little CYD, twenty on the big Guition — while tiles stay roughly the same physical size in millimetres. The same home scales across all five glasses, which is a smart touch if you standardise on the ecosystem and then upgrade a room later.
What the tiles can do
- Lights, climate, blinds and curtains, the vacuum, and media controls
- Weather, clocks, timers, and history graphs
- Your alarm with a proper keypad, plus cameras on every screen except the 2.8-inch CYD
- A tile that fills a whole page as one big switch you can hit without looking, and tiles that navigate to another page
The detail that sold me: an automation can push an alert to every screen in the house at once. Someone rings the bell, every panel lights up, and any screen with room for a picture shows who’s standing there from the doorbell camera. That’s the difference between a control panel and something that genuinely earns wall space.
Brightness, night hours, and dark mode can all be driven by automations, and if you do hand-write YAML for one screen, it survives firmware updates. Little things, but they’re the little things that decide whether a family actually uses the panels or learns to ignore them.
My buying advice
Start with one mid-size panel — the 4.3-inch Waveshare or the 4-inch Guition — in the room where the “phone in the other room” problem bites hardest. Don’t begin with the 2.8-inch CYD: it’s the cheapest entry point and a fun toy, but six tiles is tight and no camera feed is a real limitation. The 10.1-inch Guition is the living-room showpiece; earn your way to it.
The honest caveats
These are ESP32 panels, not iPads. The screens are modest, the touch is functional, and you shouldn’t expect to mirror a full Home Assistant dashboard on them — this is deliberately a tiles-and-pages model, not a mini browser. It’s also very much a community project with a solo developer and a donation link: pin the version you install, expect the occasional rough edge, and maybe throw the author a coffee if it earns a spot on your wall.
Verdict
A tablet on the wall is a general-purpose computer doing a single-purpose job badly. Tessera flips that: single-purpose hardware doing a single-purpose job properly, at a fraction of the price, with an editor simple enough that non-technical household members won’t need you to change anything. For small-business fitouts — a reception panel for the alarm, a workshop panel for the roller door — the same logic applies double. This is how wall controls should have worked all along.