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reTerminal E1001

Overview

The reTerminal E1001 is a 7.5" monochrome e-paper display mounted in the obývák (living room). It shows a weather-station dashboard driven by Home Assistant, combining outdoor conditions from an Ecowitt weather station, indoor climate, solar/battery status, and household state (front door, Tesla).

It is a companion to the E1004 (color display in the kitchen) and shares the same visual language — matching icons, footer style, and refresh behavior.

Property Value
Model Seeed reTerminal E1001 (7.5" mono e-paper)
Resolution 800 × 480, landscape
Panel driver waveshare_epaper, model 7.50inv2
MCU ESP32-S3
Power Permanently powered (deep sleep disabled)
Location Obývák (living room)
Firmware ESPHome
Flashing Wireless (OTA) — no USB cable needed

Data flow

drawing-1-1787169269.png

What it displays

The layout is a two-column dashboard:

Left side – Outdoor (VENKU)

  • Large current outdoor temperature (headline number)
  • Feels-like (Pocitová), dew point (Rosa), UV index, solar radiation (Záření)
  • Humidity (Vlhkost) as a large percentage
  • Wind (VÍTR): speed, direction, gusts
  • Rain (DÉŠŤ): current intensity and today's total

Right side – Indoor & Home (DOMA)

  • Indoor temperature + humidity
  • Air pressure (Tlak)
  • Precipitation totals (week / month / year)
  • Door state (DVEŘE) – main front door open/closed
  • Batteries – FVE (home solar battery) and Tesla vehicle battery, with home and car icons
  • Meteostanice – Ecowitt signal strength bars + station battery %
  • WiFi – device WiFi signal strength bars
  • Aktualizace HH:MM – time of last display refresh

Data sources (Home Assistant entities)

Display item HA entity
Outdoor temp sensor.ecowitt_outdoor_temp_120fb
Outdoor humidity sensor.ecowitt_outdoor_humidity_120fb
Indoor temp sensor.ecowitt_temperature_indoor
Indoor humidity sensor.ecowitt_humidity_humidityin
Pressure Ecowitt pressure sensor
Wind / rain / UV / radiation Ecowitt *_120fb sensors
Door state sensor.nuki_sevcikovi_door_state
FVE battery sensor.solax_battery_capacity_2
Tesla battery sensor.tesla_model_y_battery
Ecowitt signal sensor.ecowitt_signal_strength_120fb

Refresh behaviour

To keep the e-paper calm (color/mono e-paper refresh is slow and visually noticeable), the display does not refresh constantly. It updates on:

  • Every 5 minutes – scheduled interval
  • Outdoor temperature change – debounced (8 s) so bursts collapse into one refresh
  • Door state change – instant refresh (so an opened front door shows immediately)
  • Manual button – button.reterminal_e1001_e1001_refresh_display, exposed in HA and on the Kiosk / Overview dashboards

A debounced redraw script prevents rapid-fire refreshes: any trigger schedules a single redraw a few seconds later rather than refreshing immediately (except the door, which is intentionally instant).

Manual refresh

A template button is exposed to Home Assistant:

  • Entity: button.reterminal_e1001_e1001_refresh_display
  • Available on the Kiosk dashboard ("Displej obyvak") and the Overview dashboard
  • Pressing it forces an immediate full redraw

Hardware / pin notes

  • Deep sleep is disabled – the device is permanently powered, so it stays awake and is always reachable for OTA flashing. (Originally, deep sleep made OTA unreliable because the device was only awake briefly; disabling it fixed wireless flashing.)
  • I²C sensor (SHT40): sda = GPIO19, scl = GPIO20. ESPHome logs a harmless warning that these pins are shared with the USB-Serial-JTAG interface — this can be ignored (flashing works over WiFi and native USB, not those pins).
  • The device's own battery voltage ("Zařízení") was removed from the footer — it is permanently powered, so that value was meaningless.

Icons (shared with E1004 for consistency)

Meaning MDI icon
Temperature thermometer (U+F050F)
Humidity water-percent (U+F058E)
FVE / home home (U+F02DC)
Tesla / car car-electric (U+F0B6C)
Door door-open / door-closed

Configuration reference

The full ESPHome YAML is stored in [link to your config location].

Note: the snippet below is sanitised. The real config also contains an API encryption key, an OTA password, and WiFi credentials — these are secrets and are NOT included here. See the corresponding entry in the password manager.

# ── reTerminal E1001 (excerpt, secrets removed) ──
esphome:
  name: reterminal-e1001

esp32:
  board: esp32-s3-devkitc-1
  framework:
    type: esp-idf

# Secrets removed – see password manager:
#   api:  encryption key
#   ota:  password
#   wifi: ssid / password

spi:
  clk_pin: GPIO7
  mosi_pin: GPIO9

i2c:
  sda: GPIO19       # shared with USB-JTAG (harmless warning)
  scl: GPIO20

# Debounced redraw – collapses bursts into a single refresh
script:
  - id: request_redraw
    mode: restart
    then:
      - delay: 8s
      - component.update: epaper_display

# Manual refresh button (exposed to Home Assistant)
button:
  - platform: template
    name: "E1001 Refresh Display"
    on_press:
      then:
        - component.update: epaper_display

# 5-minute periodic refresh
interval:
  - interval: 5min
    then:
      - component.update: epaper_display

# Example trigger: instant refresh when the front door changes
text_sensor:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: door_state
    entity_id: sensor.nuki_sevcikovi_door_state
    on_value:
      then:
        - component.update: epaper_display   # instant, not debounced

History / lessons learned

  • nan display bug: early versions showed nan because the display drew before HA sensor data had loaded (a leftover from the deep-sleep wake timing). Fixed by disabling deep sleep + redrawing on sensor on_value + the periodic interval.
  • Excessive refreshing: outdoor temperature changes frequently; without debouncing this caused constant, distracting refreshes. The debounce script fixed it.
  • Layout consistency: the FVE/Tesla/door section and footer were reworked to match the E1004's icon set and footer style so the two displays feel like one system.