by prathammehta | 2026-03-09 17:56:51+00:00
I've been a HomeAssistant user for a couple of years now and I genuinely love it. The community, the endless possibilities, the fact that it connects with basically everything. I personally use it for Hue lights, mmWave sensors, my TV, Alexa, the PS5, even my Dreo humidifier.

But I've always had one frustration: I can only control it through my phone, my computer, or by talking to Alexa. None of those are great for guests. I don't have my phone on me at all times. And nothing surfaces the state of my home in a glanceable way. I've always loved real wall switches for that reason. They're instant, they don't run out of battery, and anyone can use them.

So I tried to solve this myself a couple of times.

First I put an old iPad on my wall with a custom HomeAssistant dashboard. It worked pretty well for guests and gave me glanceable info, but leaving a screen on 24/7 felt wrong. I’m sure it’s not great for the display, and it constantly emitted light that got annoying at night or during movies. It also had to stay plugged in the whole time, so I was stuck mounting it near an outlet with a cable hanging off the back. I only went through with it because I had a spare iPad sitting around. I wouldn't have spent $500+ just for this, and a cheap Android tablet or a RaspberryPi with a screen felt like a step down in quality.

Then I tried hacking a Kindle Paperwhite I wasn't using anymore. I jailbroke it, installed KOReader, and wrote a Lua app that called the HomeAssistant API. This actually worked really well. The screen stayed on al the time, the eInk display looked great and blended in with my wall, and the power management was surprisingly good. It polled the HA API every minute or so, only updated the screen when something changed, and since eInk screens don't consume power when the content is static, the thing lasted days on a charge. But it wasn't really practical long-term. Amazon keeps patching jailbreaks so I can’t really buy more of these for other rooms and I didn't love running my app inside KOReader (a tool built for something completely different), and I couldn't properly optimize sleep states on a device that was never designed for this.

So incorporating all of that, I'm now building an eInk wall panel (the prototype is based on the T5 E-Paper S3 Pro) purpose-built for HomeAssistant. It's phone-sized, mounts on your wall, and is designed from the ground up for this use case. Because eInk only consumes power when the screen content changes, the device should last around a month on a single charge (as long are careful about using the wifi on it). It sits on your wall always showing the relevant controls for whatever room it's in. Guests can use it without asking you anything. It has a full configurator support on HomeAssistant so you can set up what controls appear on each panel, and even change what's shown based on things like time of day, all without touching a yaml file. Privacy was non-negotiable for me: it works purely locally over the HomeAssistant API, no internet connection, never phones home.

We're really looking for feedback at this stage. We're early in the build process turning this prototype into a sellable device and genuinely want to learn from this community before we go too far down any particular path. If you've run into the same frustrations, if you think we're solving the wrong problem, if there's a feature you'd need before you'd consider purchasing something like this we want to hear it. Any and all feedback is encouraged.

If you're interested in the device or want to follow along, you can visit https://muros.ink and fill out the signup form. We're trying to design the right thing, and we'd rather learn that from the community now than later.