AirGradient Forum

Possibility to customize indoor display

Hardware extensions
#1

Hi all,

I’m looking into customizing the display in an AirGradient indoor unit and wanted to ask if this is something realistically supported or already attempted. The reason is to improve aesthetics.

What I’m interested in is replacing the current OLED-style display with a drop-in replacement that has:

  • white or light background
  • black digits/text (e-ink or reflective LCD style)

In theory I understand e-ink could achieve this visual style, but I’m not sure how feasible it is within the AirGradient hardware/firmware setup.

So my questions are:

  • Has anyone tried replacing the stock 1.3" OLED with an e-ink display or reflective LCD?
  • Is the firmware flexible enough to support a different display driver (SPI vs I2C changes etc.)?
  • Any recommended display modules that could fit this kind of use case?

Thanks in advance for any advice or pointers :+1:

1 Like
#2

Unless it supports the same display library, I wouldn’t expect the firmware to support any other display, but you have access to all of the code, and an AI agent could likely make great progress, especially if it uses the same i2C and even if not.

But I wouldn’t expect AirGradient to invest development time and cost to support all other displays.

I use ESPHome for most of my devices and it is pretty straight forward to change to a different component for a different display, but if the resolution is any different, it can take significant time to fine tune it to fit and look right. I’ve many times thought something would be a quick change and 3 hours later I almost have it. So just a word of caution. Making something work doesn’t always take too much effort but making something work well can be a very large jump.

2 Likes
#3

Hi @CAMOBAP, The AirGradient ONE Indoor is currently designed for I2C displays (SH110X/SSD1306 drivers). SPI isn’t supported out of the box, but it’s a possible DIY project!

We have been testing e-ink displays on the Indoor unit lately. Keep in mind that e-ink uses more pins than our OLEDs, so you’d likely need to remap the ESP pins and sacrifice some features to get it working properly.

If you’re looking for e-ink examples, check out our new AirGradient Go. The source code is available for you to see how we handled the integration, though keep in mind it uses the ESP-IDF framework rather than Arduino.

3 Likes