CYD MQTT Touchscreen UI
Using the Cheap-Yellow-Display to control smart home devices
Project started on September 28, 2025.Recent activity on GitHub: 
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After adding more actors to my Smart Home in the form of power sockets running Tasmota, I had to improve the ways to control all of these devices. The Telegram Bot and Web UI are a good start, but the Wife Acceptance Factor is pretty low, and they require access to a computer or smartphone.
Recently I learned about the CYD (cheap yellow display), a nice ESP32 dev board with a touchscreen. This seemed ideal to run a simple user interface to control everything via MQTT.
Here are the results. When not in use the device shows a stand-by screen with the current time and date. After pressing the screen a menu is shown.
I mounted multiple of these units in different places. They can be updated easily over-the-air.
To get the LDR on the device to work properly, so the screen brightness can be adjusted to the environment lighting conditions, you need to modify the hardware a bit. I removed R19 and replaced R15 with a 100k resistor. The top board in the following image is in the original state, the bottom board has already been modified.
The CYD code has been integrated into my ESP-Env project and repo.