Touch Screen Control Panels

On one of my many journies through the AliExpress app, I stumbled across some cheap touch screens that looked interesting made by a group called Sunton

so on they go to the wishlist, something to look into later.

At some point, I stumbled across the project openHASP - a simple way to build touch screens. Fortunately, they just added support for the Sunton screens in their nightly builds. Happy days! Ordered one, waited the usual 2 weeks, and whacked on the demo to get an idea on what it looked like:

All of the elements on the screen post messages over MQTT to the broker specified in the inital config of the device.

The wheels start spinning and I get an idea to replace my old shelf layout pushbuttons with this screen. Out come the TAM Valley controllers, in goes two ESPs, and two PCA9685 boards to control the servos.

Using my ESPHome repo I programmed the servos and their endpoints, but still needed a way to translate the message from the touch screen to the ESP as they have two different topic/message formats. Enter Node-Red:

This node listens for OpenHASP (hasp/#) Messages, and when it receives one, translates the format based on some tags in the touch screen config and pushes it to a trains/track/turnout topic that the ESP uses to change a point.

I'll do a more detailed post eventually and share some example code if anyone wants to try themselves, but i've got some other plans on how to integrate these touch screens into operating sessions.

Until next time!