While the campaign is going strong, we are working hard redesigning many parts. One of the most popular requests has always been the LCD UI. Let’s dig right into it…

The LCD UI so far has been very sluggish due to the fact that we use the HABPanel. HABPanel is an add-on of openHAB that allows easy UI modifications, but it is very heavy for our little Pi Zero CPU-wise. So we removed it and redesigned a new UI for the LCD (the phone app UI stays the same). It is based on pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript and talks to openHAB via MQTT over websockets. We had to compile our own mosquitto server as the standard Raspbian package does not support websockets yet. We built a little proof-of-concept UI with just 2 buttons adjusting the temperature set-point and from another tablet we observed the speed the change is propagated. The results prove us right on deciding to go that way. Here is the short video:

Being based on plain HTML, means we (you) can display pretty much anything we want on the LCD.

So next stop, redesigning the actual UI…