Home automation - TFT touch display

[qobouky]

Hello,

I would like to promote my home automation system and be able to control room settings for each room.

I use MySensors + MyController.

In rooms I measure Temperature, Humidity, AirQuality, and I control air condition, heating and electronic window blind.

I would like to have a TFT touch display in each room with possibility to see all measured values and (on button click or slide) + be able to control temperature (thermostat), open or close window blind.

Additionally i would like to build it small .. not like on mega but on nano. Unfortunatley NRF and TFT use MISO/MOSI so I need to use custom pins for TFT.

Do you know if it is doable and could you recommend solution/concept?

Thank you very much!

[rejoe2]

@qobouky
Interesting approach, I have some ideas to also go this route (just as a central scene controller), but didn't find the time yet to get that done (and some other challanging tasks with higher priority).

So some of my findings wrt. using displays with MySensors:
Sharing SPI is possible, see e.g. the Dollhouse TV example. I also did some poc work wrt. that, code is here with two digital SPI resistors parallel to the nRF - works, just requires 2 additional pins for CS and some initialisation in before().

But as especially using graphics modes might need more power and memory than a ATMega328 can provide, the scene controler uses an ATMega 2650.
If you want to miniaturize things, you may have a look at other mcus like STM32F103 or NRF52. One of my next projects will most likely "require" to use the STM32 (also MySensors, but - most likely at least in the first version - not with a display).

[gohan]

I think nextion displays could solve some of your communication issues since they run over normal serial.

[heinzv]

I'm on the way to implement something similar with e-paper (without touch at the moment) to save battery.
However I will use an additional SPI port and require a lot more flash/RAM as ATmegas provide. Also with the STM32 I'm comming to a limit.
Thus I'm switching to an ESP32 barebone module for 3,63€ (4,20$) and habe 4 SPI ports, many I2C ports etc.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP32-ESP32S-WIFI-Bluetooth-Module-240MHz-Dual-Core-CPU-MCU-Wireless-Network-Board-ESP-WROOM-32/32817688406.html?spm=a2g0s.8937460.0.0.xvTLd7

The nice thing with the ESP32 is, that it has 10 touch panel ports on-chip and is very engergy efficient (if used with battery). We had this discussion already and if the bare module is used is has on one hand suffient MCU power as wel as very low engery in sleep/deep sleep. IT has WiFi, BlueTooth, no limits with Flash/RAM etc.

Think about it.

The best thing: There is a brach or event a planned PR which supports ESP32.
See here:
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/9167/esp32-support-to-enable-the-powerful-esp32-rfm95-lora-lipo-battery-boards