I bought the 7inch version and now the 4.3” version of the Waveshare ESP32-S3 touch screens to monitor my Solar setup in the shed and to control the lighting there. Everything in the Solar/Battery ecosystem is now run soley on ESP32’s from gathering data from the Victron equipment, gathering temperature and humidity settings int he battery compartment and the shed, controlling the cooling fans, lights, raising the lid of the battery compartment when its hot, hosting the data on the website and now the 7inch screen is the main control screen int he shed (replaces the raspberry pi 7inch touch screen) and the smaller unit sits in the study so I cam keep an eye on things. The programming of the screens takes some doing, I got the all the code for fetching the data from the various ESP32 sender units sorted out then utliised CODEX to help get the screen to work. I did find Waveshares documentation on the screen settings and pins used a bit lean as i decided to use Platformi rather than ESP-IDE but once those settings got sorted it was plain sailing.
After getting these working so well, I will be replacing a few other Pi Screens that dont really require an OS to do their job with a few of these ESP32 screens and repurpose those Pi Units for jobs better suited to their capabilities.
Powerwise these are far better with less power consumption. Well worth the effort
On the screen, the blue sections control the relay int he shed for the lights, while the two on the bottom of the screen overwrite the time scheduled screen on off function I included in the code. I dont like screens on at night . Too much light. So touching the screen while its off will bring the screen to life during the sleep period. It will return to sleep after 15minutes unless I press one of the bottom buttons.
These units are more versatile than I first imagined.
