Conditional tiles, and a free-form content block

[Sporren1234]

I'm running Tessera on two Guition 10.1" screens (a jc8012p4a1v2 in the
kitchen and another in the living room) plus a 4". They've become the main
glanceable surface in the house, which is exactly what I wanted — thank you
for the project.

Living with them has surfaced two gaps that are really the same underlying
problem: a screen on a wall should tell you what needs your attention, not
present a list of states and leave you to work it out. Reading the
dashboard should take almost no effort.

---

1. Conditional tiles — show a tile only when it's relevant

Today every tile is bound to an entity at config time and always renders.
That means anything occasionally interesting has to be permanently
visible.

A concrete example from my kitchen page. I want to know when an appliance
needs me:

• Dishwasher needs emptying
• Dishwasher needs rinse aid
• Washing finished, needs hanging
• Bin goes out tonight

Right now that's four permanent tiles, and almost always all four are
irrelevant. They're noise 95% of the time, and because they're always
there you stop reading them — which means you also miss them on the one day
they matter.

What would help

An optional visibility rule per tile. Even something simple would transform
this:

• Show when the tile's entity is in state X (or not in state Y)
• Show when the value is above/below a threshold
• Show when another entity is in a given state

A template-based condition would be the most flexible, but a simple
state/threshold match would cover most of what I need.

Tiles that hide would ideally reflow so the page doesn't leave holes.

---

2. A free-form content block (like Lovelace's Markdown card)

The second gap is that every piece of information has to be an entity in a
card. Some information isn't one value — it's a small explanation, or a
comparison, or a couple of related numbers that only make sense together.

I have an energy management layer that decides overnight battery charge
targets. In Lovelace I show it as a Markdown card: a heading, a small
two-column table (planned vs applied), a sentence of plain-English
reasoning with the key numbers in bold, and a status line. (Screenshot
attached.)

It's genuinely useful because it reads as a short briefing rather than six
disconnected values. There's currently no way to put anything like that on
a Tessera screen — I'd have to decompose it into six sensor tiles and lose
the thing that makes it readable.

What would help

A content block tile that renders templated markdown, spanning a
configurable number of cells — the Tessera equivalent of Lovelace's
Markdown card. Headings, bold, and simple tables would cover the great
majority of cases.

This would also be the natural answer to request 1 for text: a block that
renders empty when there's nothing to say, and disappears.

---

Why these two together

Combined, they'd let a page be mostly quiet and speak up when it matters:
ambient information that's always there (time, temperature, camera, lights),
one content block that summarises what needs doing, and conditional tiles
for the occasional exception.

Happy to test builds on V2 hardware — I've done so before on #92.

[karlpelzer70-afk]

@Sporren1234
Do you know about the alerts from automations (https://tessera-maxgramser.on-forge.com/docs/alerts)? You can create notifications by HA that appear on top of the cards, when a certain condition was raised. It wakes the display from standby and stays on until this notification is confirmed by tapping on the button.

[Sporren1234]

Thanks @karlpelzer70-afk, I do know about alerts and they're great for the genuinely urgent stuff (someone at the door, that kind of thing). They're a different job from what I'm after though:

• An alert is interruptive. It wakes the screen and sits there until someone taps it. For "the dishwasher needs emptying" or "bins go out tonight" that would get irritating fast, and the rest of the household would soon start dismissing them without reading.
• I want it ambient: a page that is quiet most of the time, shows the few things that need doing, and clears itself when the condition is gone, with no tap to acknowledge.

I have this built as a Lovelace Markdown card (screenshot attached). A template builds a short list from live state, split into House and Homelab and sorted by urgency, and items disappear on their own once fixed. It has become the most useful glanceable thing in the house, and I can't get it onto a Tessera screen because a tile can only show a single entity.

@MaxGramser, one thought on feasibility, in case it helps: the add-on already draws things like the map for the screen, so could a "content block" tile work the same way? The add-on would render a Jinja template (or read an entity attribute, since a state is capped at 255 characters) and push the result to the screen, and the firmware would only need to draw a small markdown subset: headings, bold, bullets and simple tables. That might keep the firmware side small. I haven't looked at the code, so I may be off the mark.

If you'd be open to the idea, I'm happy to test on the 10.1" V2 and the 4" screens, and to help with a PR if you can point me at where tile types are defined.

[MaxGramser]

This request and its replies have moved to the Tessera wishlist.

Please continue there and upvote the wish if you would use it. Sign in with your GitHub account to vote, reply or add examples. More votes help set priorities, including support for new ESP boards and displays.

The original authors, dates, comments and image links have been preserved. This GitHub thread is kept as an archive. GitHub Issues are now for bugs in existing functionality; closing this thread does not mean the request was rejected or implemented. Its current status is on the website.

---

Got a screen running? Tell others which board you have and what works on the Tessera website. It helps everyone pick a screen that works.

Want me to keep building? Consider supporting monthly or buying me a coffee, much appreciated!