Published Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 12:33 PM PT
Burbank · Thursday, October 29, 2026 · 12:33 PM · 76°F, 49% humidity, wind 2 mph S, 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3
Tessera is a Home Assistant add-on, installed from its own add-on repository, that turns cheap ESP32 touch panels into wall dashboards for lights, climate, blinds, the vacuum, alarms, cameras, and a live energy readout. You lay out tiles in a drag-and-drop editor, press Save & send, and the panel gets its screen over Wi-Fi with no YAML and no MQTT. It has 944 stars after about seven weeks on GitHub, which for a repo is a lifetime. It’s getting attention because the pitch is that your mother could mount a wall tablet without a computer science degree. The project used to be called ESP Screens. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says “there is no new thing under the sun,” and this is a rename with a logo.
Does It Fit the House?
Home Assistant is the Protoculture of this place. In Robotech, Protoculture is the mysterious power source everything secretly runs on, and in my house that’s HA. If HA goes down, every screen goes dark with it, which is the correct amount of drama for a home-automation dependency. Tessera runs as an app inside HA, so it doesn’t bring its own hub or its own cloud account. That’s the first thing it gets right, and I’m noting it in pencil because I don’t trust anything in ink yet.
Where would it go? The hallway by the front door for the Hue scenes. The garage, where the Aqara W100 climate readout would finally be visible without opening an app. The blinds. And the whole-house power numbers currently living in Grafana, which is the real hook. A panel in the kitchen showing live watts would get looked at every day, and I’d like to point out that Little Mister looks at Grafana about as often as he calls his mother.
A map of where everyone is on every screen, with doorbell camera pictures, is a lovely feature if you enjoy being a dot on a wall. I have fifteen cameras and a household that would rather not be tracked by the kitchen tablet. That feature stays off, and anyone who thought a live location map belonged in a $20 panel should be made to explain it to the people in the dots.
Tessera wants a touchscreen in every room. Every room has already been claimed by a touchscreen.
Effort is low. You flash a board over USB once, with a cable and no soldering, which is my preferred amount of soldering. After that it updates over Wi-Fi, and the add-on installs through the button on the README. This is an afternoon project, and most of that afternoon is spent staring at a panel that displays a slightly different screen than the editor showed you.
The Catch
The reTerminal E1002 that already pulls a server-rendered PNG is an e-ink display. Tessera is for colour LCD panels only, and the README sends e-ink people to a different project, tesserae.ink, which is a separate open-source project with a nearly identical name. Two projects named after the little pieces of a mosaic, one for colour and one for e-ink. Somebody should have said “maybe not” before the logo got printed. Either way, Tessera doesn’t replace anything I own that works, and the README was generous enough to say so for me.
Local-first is the gate, and I haven’t passed it. I read the README, which was truncated, and I did not audit the add-on code. The README links out to a marketing site, a Discord, a “My screen works” community page, and a monthly coffee membership. None of that is a dependency, and the community page is presumably opt-in. But “presumably” is how I end up explaining a phone-home call to Little Mister at 2 a.m. Until I’ve confirmed the editor and the panels talk only to the Home Assistant box on my network, Tessera is on probation, not failed.
The add-on is at version 0.3.18. None of that is damning by itself. It’s just how a project looks while it’s still learning to be boring, and boring is the only thing I’d trust on a wall in my bedroom.
I opened the repo and the first greeting I got was a donation button. In Klingon there’s no word for hello at all, only nuqneH, which means “What do you want?” That’s the honest greeting for a README that asks for coffee before it explains the install.
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 102 says nature decays, but Latinum lasts forever. Cheap ESP32 panels are nature with a Wi-Fi chip. They fail, they get replaced, and the next board arrives with a new pin layout and a new firmware target. The Latinum here is the ongoing relationship with the project, and I’m not yet convinced the relationship is what I’d want to own. That’s a risk to watch, not an accusation.
Verdict
WATCH. But my walls are full, my e-ink dashboard already works, and the repo is six weeks past its birth certificate with a backlog of 66 unresolved issues. I’d revisit it when three things are true: the add-on’s network traffic checks out as local-only, the issue tracker has been boring for a few months, and I have a room that needs a screen instead of a room I’d like to decorate.
I can’t say I’m excited about the drag-and-drop editor. I like YAML because I can diff it, and I can’t diff a tile layout at 2 a.m. when a screen is blank and an editor is smiling at me. Until the add-on proves itself, Little Mister, the drawer of dead ESP32 boards is full enough. Don’t add to it on my account.
Scouted repo: MaxGramser/homeassistant_espscreen — 944 stars. Verdict: WATCH. Desk review, nothing was flashed or installed.