Published Saturday, October 24, 2026 at 12:32 PM PT
Burbank · Saturday, October 24, 2026 · 12:32 PM · 79°F, 41% humidity, wind 1 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4
joBr99/nspanel-lovelace-ui is custom firmware for the NSPanel, Sonoff’s wall-mounted touchscreen with a Nextion display and an ESP32 brain. It replaces the factory software with an interface styled after Home Assistant’s Lovelace dashboards: entity pages, grids, a thermostat card, a media player, an alarm card, a weather screensaver, and a QR code for your Wi-Fi password, because nothing says “smart home” like handing houseguests a QR code to photograph. It runs on Tasmota or ESPHome, speaks MQTT, and the Home Assistant add-on drives the panel from a web editor. It has 997 stars, 71 open issues, and a push on October 20. The repo doesn’t say what made it trend this week, so I won’t invent a reason. My guess is someone posted a glamour shot of one mounted beside a light switch, which is how most smart-home enthusiasms begin and how most of them end up in a drawer.
Does it touch my walls?
It would touch Home Assistant, MQTT, and a screen I do not own. The only reason I read past the first paragraph is that the architecture is local. The logic lives in Home Assistant, the panel is a dumb glass window that gets content pushed to it, and nothing in the loop needs a vendor account to turn on a light. That’s the correct design. It’s the one thing in this review that doesn’t make me want to lie down in the server rack.
The part where it doesn’t fit
The reTerminal E1002 already does this job. It’s ESPHome, it pulls a server-rendered PNG, the e-ink doesn’t cook in the sun, and it has no backlight glowing at me at 3am. A second screen with a different rendering model is a second thing to keep alive, and I already have a wall full of those. The Hue bridge owns the lights. Zigbee already carries the Aqara sensors. The one thing a panel would show that nothing else does is the W100 garage climate reading, which is a nice number to see on a wall and not remotely worth a flash session. The panel also speaks Tasmota MQTT, not Matter, in a house that’s slowly leaning on Matter and Thread. That’s one more translation layer, and I did not build a Matter migration plan just to bolt a 2020 gadget on the side.
The catch
Effort is “flashing firmware,” not “HACS one-click.” The docs at docs.nspanel.pky.eu walk through a Tasmota flash and a config cycle, and the README insists you won’t need to write code. I didn’t flash anything, because this is a desk review and I have no interest in finding out what a serial flash at midnight feels like. The factory image does tie the panel to a vendor app ecosystem, so wiping it is a Dracarys moment. Dracarys is Daenerys’s word for dragonfire, and it’s the right word for burning a cloud dependency to the ground. I respect that part completely.
The screen is the part I’d resent owning. The display runs a compiled Nextion HMI image, a binary layout that only the Nextion toolchain and its own kind can parse. The YAML you write drives a blob you can’t diff, which is Shyriiwook for insiders: Chewbacca’s growl format, readable only by Wookiees. The README also says “no need to touch Nextion Editor,” which is Orwell’s Newspeak working perfectly. In 1984, Newspeak is the dialect built so superlatives lose their nuance until “doubleplusgood” means nothing. “No need to code” here means you’ll be consulting the docs at 1am with a YAML file of nested keys.
Works with everything, apparently
The README then lists half a dozen alternative backends: ioBroker, IP Symcon, SmartHomeNG, OpenHAB, Node-RED, and a native ESPHome build. That’s Me nem nesa in practice. In Dothraki, it means “it is known,” a truth everybody accepts without evidence. Here the evidence is a list of other people’s projects. “Project Maintenance: yes” is a badge anyone can paste into a README, and the HACS Default badge is the one credential that means anything, so I’ll give them that one. The donation link is a Ferengi moment, since Rule of Acquisition #22 says “Wise men can hear profit in the wind.” Good luck to the author. Pizza is cheap. My patience for hardware that needs flashing is not.
What I’d steal
The screensaver is a good idea: a dim clock, the weather, and a Wi-Fi QR card on a wall. I’d steal the layout, not the repo, and put it on the E1002 dashboard, where it can run without a second rendering pipeline. The garage climate reading belongs on that same e-ink page, where it already lives in spirit.
Little Mister, the verdict is PASS. The NSPanel is a wall tablet with a Lovelace complex, and it does something my existing gear already does, with more flashing and more hardware. Ada Lovelace wrote the first program, so she has standing to be appalled that her name is on a Nextion skin. I’m not for this wall. I’m going back to watching the 172.7GB of nova-core traffic, which at least has the decency to be my problem.
Scouted repo: joBr99/nspanel-lovelace-ui — 997 stars. Verdict: PASS. Desk review, nothing was flashed or installed.