Nodex LCD · for Home Assistant
A 20×4 character display on a shelf, and Home Assistant writes every line of it. No dashboard to unlock, no tablet to charge, no app to open — just four lines of text that are always right there.
Character LCDs are honest. They're readable across a room, they don't glow like a television at 2am, and they can't show you an advert.
Energy — four lines from one automation
Set up from your phone and driven entirely by your own Home Assistant — nothing it shows ever leaves the house.
How it works
Home Assistant sets the text of any line, whenever you like. That's the whole interface — which is what makes it useful, because you're not limited to whatever screens a manufacturer imagined.
Usually the one you glance at. The thing that changes the decision — next train, grid price, is the immersion on.
Supporting detail for line 1, or the second-most-important number.
Something slower-moving — bin day, the forecast, how the battery's doing.
A good place for alerts: blank most of the time, loud when it isn't.
Twenty characters per line sounds tight until you try it. Bins: recycling Tue is eighteen. The constraint is the feature — it forces the display to say one clear thing instead of forty vague ones.
Set a line's text from an automation, a script, a button press, or a template that re-renders every minute. The device's own actions appear in Home Assistant under the device, named after it, so they autocomplete in the automation editor.
Because it's plain text, anything you can template you can display — entity states, forecasts, calendar entries, a countdown you worked out yourself.
The backlight appears in Home Assistant as an ordinary light entity. Dim it in the evening, kill it overnight, or flash it when something needs you — all from the automations you already have.
On a landing or a bedside table that matters more than it sounds: the display stays readable in daylight and disappears completely at night.
Out of the box
It ships already flashed. Nothing to install, and no YAML to write unless you want to.
Any phone charger or spare USB port. The display lights up on a setup screen.
On your phone, join the open WiFi network the display names on screen. A setup page opens by itself.
Choose your network, enter the password. It reconnects on its own.
A New device discovered notification appears. Click Configure and the display, its backlight and its actions all show up at once.
What to put on it
These are just starting points — anything Home Assistant knows can go on it.
Solar now, grid import, the current agile rate and what today has cost you. The numbers that actually change whether you put the washing on.
Rate 7.5p · Solar 2.4 kW
Bin day, who's home, the next thing in the calendar, how long the washing machine has left. The questions people shout up the stairs.
Bins: recycling Tue
Printer progress, server temperature, backup state, whether the door is actually locked. Glanceable without a browser tab open.
Print 62% · 41 min
Keep three lines steady and leave the fourth blank. When the leak sensor trips or the freezer warms up, write to line four and bring the backlight up.
! Utility leak 04:12
At a glance
Get one
Sold through our Etsy shop, where you'll find the current price, photos and postage. It arrives ready — the only thing left is your WiFi password and deciding what goes on line one.
Questions before you buy? Email hello@tps505.com — you'll get an answer from the person who built it.