v1.3.0

This release adds a sixth board, the Makerfabs MaTouch ESP32-S3 Rotary 2.1", whose knob sets the volume and scrolls the lists, and makes the remote's error screens something you can act on from the device: every card about a problem leads to the status page and the settings, a rejected token can be linked again with a tap, and now playing says when Home Assistant has gone quiet.

Added

• Makerfabs MaTouch ESP32-S3 Rotary 2.1": a 2.1" round 480 px ST7701 panel with CST826 touch, built as matouch21-s3, and on the install page. Its knob turns the volume on now playing and scrolls the lists, a row a click; a press plays or pauses on now playing, goes back one step elsewhere, and taps a card.
• Sources: a swipe right on the lower half of now playing lists the volume device's inputs; tap one to switch to it, switching the device on first if it is off.
• Search from now playing: a swipe left on the lower half opens the artist search directly. The search has a back button at the top left.
• Status and settings from a card: on Home Assistant not reachable, Token rejected, No Wi-Fi and Link to HA, a swipe down opens the status page and a gear at the top right opens the settings. The sign-in QR code has the swipe down, and the player list the gear. A swipe up on the status page goes back to where it was opened from.
• Link again from a rejected token: the card, or the amber chip on now playing, says Token rejected; a tap puts the sign-in QR code back up, keeping the URL. Meanwhile the remote asks Home Assistant for nothing, trying the token again only every ten minutes, so it does not fill the log with failed sign-ins or get its address banned.
• Offline mark: when Home Assistant has not been heard from for 10 s, now playing's elapsed time turns amber and says Offline, and the status page gives the error on an HA line.
• Back on Wi-Fi after a router outage: a remote that started while its router was down retries the saved network every minute from the setup portal, and carries on by itself once the router is back.
• Documentation: the README keeps the interface, setting up and the portal; building, the code, internals, troubleshooting and a table of every error card are in docs/.

Changed

• A device playing outside Music Assistant is controlled directly: where the Music Assistant player is idle while its native entity plays something of its own -- a TV in Disney Plus -- now playing shows the native entity's title, art and state, and the buttons go to it.
• Volume with the volume device off: a volume swipe, or a turn of the MaTouch's knob, switches the device on first, as play does, where it can be switched on; the next one sets the level.
• Losing Wi-Fi while running: the No Wi-Fi card, "Signal lost, retrying", replaces a frozen Connecting card, the remote keeps retrying in the background, and goes back to now playing when the link returns.
• Status page: the gear is at the top right, and the received and transmitted power have a line each.
• Sharper covers on the 2.8C: 512 px instead of 256 px, about 0.16 s more per track change.
• List rows at the edge of a round screen keep half the panel's width instead of pinching to a sliver.
• Settings before linking leave out Media player and Volume & power.
• The player list lights a tapped row while the choice is stored.

Fixed

• After choosing a media player or Volume & power device on the device, the settings and status pages showed the old one until reopened.
• Linking in the portal while the Link to HA card or QR code was up left the card on screen until it was tapped.
• After Wi-Fi dropped, the first attempt to rejoin could fail because the core's own reconnect was still running.
• Home Assistant logged a template error on every update when a list in the remote's templates was empty.
• The DFR1221 had no serial console on its USB port.

Updating

• A remote already set up: upload your board's firmware-<board>.bin on its portal's Update page. Settings are kept. <board> is waveshare-s3, round360-s3, lcd28c-s3, matouch21-s3 or qualia-720.
• Install from the browser: pvanbaren.github.io/ha-media-remote flashes a board plugged in over USB, using Chrome or Edge on a computer. It erases the settings, so use it for a new board.
• First install over USB: pio run -e <board> -t upload
• Blank board: firmware-<board>-merged.bin flashes it from address 0 with a web flasher. It erases the settings.

See the README for setup, and the changelog for every release.

v1.2.0

This release adds a fifth board, the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-2.8C, and two controls on now playing: a tap to switch the amplifier on or off, and Isolate, which turns off the other rooms sharing this one's input. It also makes now playing much faster to repaint on every board.

Added

• Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-2.8C: a 2.8" round 480 px panel with GT911 touch, built as lcd28c-s3, and on the install page. The USB-C port is the S3's own USB, so uploads and the serial console need no driver.
• Power tap: a tap on the top half of now playing, where a sideways swipe sets the volume, switches the volume device on or off. This works for a device that supports switching on or off. Home Assistant decides which way, from the device's state at that moment. When the tap switches the device on, it also gets the player's input and the player volume at switch-on, as play does. The volume is drawn grey while the device is off.
• Isolate a room: when other zones of the volume device, such as other Triad outputs, are on this room's input, a +N rooms chip appears at the top of now playing. Tap it for a card listing those rooms, with Isolate and Cancel buttons. Isolate turns them off while this room keeps playing. A zone that changes input before you press it is left alone.

Changed

• Faster now playing: play, pause and volume no longer redraw the cover and the track text from scratch. A tap's repaint went from 0.5–1 s to about 0.1 s on the 2.8C, and a new cover appears in about half the time.
• A zone follows its input's player whatever that player is doing: with the volume device on another input, the remote shows and controls that input's player even while it is idle or off, rather than falling back to its own player. Play and pause are sent as play and pause rather than a toggle, so a press meant to start a player can't pause one playing unheard behind another input. A phone casting to a device that Music Assistant wraps is controlled through the device itself.
• Settings rows light up when tapped: the moment a tap on the settings page or a list of choices registers, its row lights up. Some choices take a second or two to load or store, and before this nothing on screen showed that the tap had been taken.
• More characters: the fonts now cover all of Latin Extended-A plus Romanian's ș and ț, so names in central European, Romanian, Turkish and Baltic languages show in full. For example, "Andrei Ioniță" lost two of its letters before.
• Sign-in QR code: drawn with a thin white border rather than a wide one. The remote's address goes directly under the code, where it fits without being cut short, with the Home Assistant instance's name below it.
• Linking to Home Assistant again: the remote replaces only the token it made itself and names the new one with the first free name. Before, linking again failed when both names it tried were taken. When two remotes shared a hostname, linking one could also delete the other's token.

Fixed

• The cover art cache had not been used since before v1.0.0, so every repaint fetched and decoded the cover again. The art still showed, only slowly.
• A fling on a list kept no momentum when the list was slow to redraw.
• The remote could restart while linking to Home Assistant, or during a fling on a list, when its main task ran out of stack.
• After linking on the device, the portal showed the Music Assistant entry as blank, and saving the page then sent it blank.
• In the portal, the player dropdowns now update when a player is renamed in Home Assistant. A stored player that is no longer listed is shown as itself and marked "(not listed now)".
• In the portal, after a save that changed only the media player, the page now shows the new player. Before, it showed the old one, so the save looked as if it hadn't taken.

Updating

• A remote already set up: upload your board's firmware-<board>.bin on its portal's Update page. Settings are kept. <board> is waveshare-s3, round360-s3, lcd28c-s3 or qualia-720.
• Install from the browser: pvanbaren.github.io/ha-media-remote flashes a board plugged in over USB, using Chrome or Edge on a computer. It erases the settings, so use it for a new board.
• First install over USB: pio run -e <board> -t upload
• Blank board: firmware-<board>-merged.bin flashes it from address 0 with a web flasher. It erases the settings.

See the README for setup, and the changelog for every release.

v1.1.0

The remote can now be set up and adjusted on the device itself, without a phone or a browser: choose the Wi-Fi network, link to Home Assistant with a QR code, choose the media player, and change the everyday settings from a new settings page.

New

• Settings on the device: a gear on the status page opens a settings page for everything that needs no typing: the Wi-Fi network, the media player, the volume and power device, the player's input on it, the player volume at switch-on, Wi-Fi transmit power, the search keyboard and the screen rotation, and a restart. Tap a row for its choices, tap one to store it, and the portal shows the new value the next time it is opened.
• Choose Wi-Fi on the device: tap the Setup or No Wi-Fi card, or swipe left on the status page, for a list of the networks in range, and type the password on a phone-style keyboard. A new network is only kept once it connects, so a wrong password never costs the one that worked.
• Link to Home Assistant with a QR code: once on Wi-Fi, the remote finds Home Assistant on the network and shows a QR code. Scan it, sign in, and the remote makes its own long-lived token. There's no URL to type and no token to paste. Linking again replaces the token rather than adding another.
• Choose the player on the device: with Home Assistant linked and no player chosen, the remote lists the media players to pick from, with unavailable ones greyed.
• Back button: the status page, the settings and the Wi-Fi pages have a back button at the top left, which does what a swipe right does.

Changed

• The amplifier is switched on only for playback you start on the remote: a press of play that starts playback, or something picked from the list or the search. A tap that wakes the screen no longer switches it on, nor does the player starting by itself, so casting from a phone to a player that several rooms share no longer switches on every room's amplifier.
• Player volume at switch-on (formerly Player volume on wake) is set only when the remote switches the amplifier on, so a cast from a phone keeps the volume it was cast at. A level already saved carries over.
• Status page: the received signal and transmit power share one line, to make room for the gear.

Fixed

• An app that names itself but not what it is playing, such as a Roku channel, is now titled with the app's name instead of "Nothing playing".
• Reloading or going back to the portal's save page no longer clears settings: a save that does not come from the form is ignored, and the browser is sent back to the form.
• Spaces and line breaks pasted around a URL, token or entity id are trimmed when saved, and settings already stored with them are repaired at startup.
• The portal's input list for the volume device is fetched again when it would otherwise show the stored input as "not listed now".
• Qualia: a USB upload no longer also writes the TinyUF2 bootloader into the second app slot, where it could later be booted instead of the remote's firmware.

Updating

• From v1.0.0: upload your board's firmware.bin on the portal's Update page. Settings are kept.
• Install from the browser: pvanbaren.github.io/ha-media-remote flashes a board plugged in over USB, using Chrome or Edge on a computer. It erases the settings, so use it for a new board.
• First install over USB: pio run -e <env> -t upload
• Blank board: firmware-merged.bin flashes it from address 0 with a web flasher. It erases the settings.

See the README for setup and details.

v1.0.0

Home Assistant Media Remote v1.0.0

The first release: a touch remote for one Home Assistant media_player, running on an ESP32-S3 with a small display. It talks to Home Assistant directly over its WebSocket and REST APIs, so there's nothing to install on the server.

Boards

• Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-1.28: 240×240 round (waveshare-s3)
• DFRobot DFR1221: 360×360 round (round360-s3)
• Adafruit Qualia ESP32-S3 with the 4" 720×720 square panel (qualia-720)

Features

• Now playing: full-screen cover art with the title and artist, previous / play-pause / next, a volume swipe and the elapsed time.
• Separate volume and power device: an amplifier or receiver is switched on, off and to the player's input when needed.
• With Music Assistant: a swipe-up list of the room's recent artists and recommendations, and an artist search that starts the artist's radio.
• Status page: swipe down to see the device's name, its player, IP address, uptime and Wi-Fi link.
• Blanking: the screen blanks after five minutes idle and switches the volume device off with it.
• Web portal setup: Wi-Fi, Home Assistant URL and token, player, volume device, rotation, transmit power and more.
• Network updates: two app slots, and settings are kept across updates.

Installing

• First install over USB: pio run -e <env> -t upload
• Updates: upload your board's firmware.bin on the portal's Update page.
• Blank board: firmware-merged.bin flashes it from address 0 with a web flasher. It erases the settings.

See the README for setup and details.