Slate
A wall dashboard for the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7 that renders from JSON fetched at runtime. Flash once, from this page; everything afterwards happens over WiFi.
This browser cannot open a serial port. Chrome, Edge or another Chromium-based browser on a desktop can; Firefox and Safari do not implement Web Serial, and neither does any browser on iOS.
This page has to be served over HTTPS or from localhost before a browser will allow it near a serial port.
Before you press it
- The board must be the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 variant — 16 MB of flash, 8 MB of PSRAM. The partition table is drawn for 16 MB and an 8 MB module cannot hold it. Vendor documentation for this board describes an N8R8 that at least some units are not, so trust the marking printed on the module rather than the datasheet.
- Connect the panel to this computer with a USB-C cable that carries data, and power it from something that can deliver about 1 A at 5 V.
-
Close anything else holding the port — a serial monitor, the Arduino
IDE,
idf.py monitor. Only one program can own it.
Erasing the device during installation also erases its configuration, administrator security settings, External API keys and stored WiFi credentials, which live outside the firmware partitions and otherwise survive an update. On a panel that has never run Slate there is nothing to lose; on one that has, export the dashboard from the editor first.
What happens next
-
The panel boots, finds no WiFi credentials, and raises its own access
point called
slate-xxxxxx. Its name, the address to open and a QR that joins it are printed on the screen. -
Join that network from a phone or laptop and open
http://192.168.4.1. Pick your WiFi, type the password, optionally set a 4–12 digit administrator PIN, and submit. - The result appears on the panel, not in the browser. The device has one radio, so joining your network drops the setup network at the instant it succeeds. On success the screen shows the panel's address and an address-only QR.
- Scan the QR to open the editor served by the panel. Enter the administrator PIN if one was configured, then choose a provider and arrange the first page.
Updates
The panel offers releases, and installs one when you say so. This page installs a fixed version over a cable; after that the panel checks once a day against a small manifest published beside this page, and what it finds waits in the editor's Firmware updates panel. Nothing is downloaded by that check and nothing restarts unasked — a wall panel does not get to reboot itself in the middle of an evening.
A version can still be installed from this page again, or over WiFi with the tool in the repository. None of the three disturbs the configuration.