Crafting My Ultimate Star Trek Control Panel Experience

One of the hobbies I picked up during the pandemic that really stuck with me is home automation. I stumbled upon Home Assistant, an incredibly customizable open-source platform that allows you to optimize your smart home experience in countless ways.

As someone with ADHD, I’ve found Home Assistant to be a game-changer for managing executive dysfunction. I rely on it for audible calendar alerts, laundry reminders, timers, and monitoring my doorbell and dog camera. Beyond its practical uses, it brings me a lot of nerdy joy. Recently, I took a particularly exciting step in my home automation journey.

Home Assistant allows you to create custom dashboards for interacting with your smart devices. The community has dedicated countless hours to perfecting their dashboards, and some of them are truly impressive. I even found a community theme that mimics the LCARS interface from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I grew up loving. While LCARS isn’t the most practical interface, it’s undeniably stunning. The aesthetic captured my imagination when I was eight, and it still holds a special place in my heart.

Most of my home automation runs automatically, and I heavily utilize voice control (yes, “Computer” is my wake word—totally worth the false alarms during Star Trek marathons). However, there are times when I prefer manual control, especially for weather displays or custom lighting scenes. Since I became enamored with Home Assistant, I’ve wanted to create an LCARS-style interface. The theme I found is great and serves as my phone’s main dashboard, but it’s not without its flaws.

The sizing of the elbow dividers is slightly off, and the buttons are split into two pieces. These are minor details, but as a fan, I strive for accuracy. So, I decided to create my own version.

I recently discovered LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library), which allows for much more customizable and sophisticated graphic interfaces than the standard Home Assistant dashboard. I figured there had to be a way to connect LVGL with Home Assistant. The final piece of the puzzle was ESPHome, an open-source firmware framework that enables coding novices like me to use a simple markup language to program Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers like the ESP32, ESP8266, and RP2040, all while integrating seamlessly with Home Assistant. The potential is vast. I use ESPHome components for motion detection, presence sensing, air quality monitoring, and LED strip control. Plus, ESPHome supports LVGL on specific display hardware.

So, I picked up a Waveshare 7” touch display with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller and got to work.

I spent hours online searching for screenshots and fan recreations of various LCARS panels from ’90s Star Trek. I eventually settled on a design I liked, which features a graphic seen in Tuvok’s quarters in Star Trek: Voyager. While I’m not sure what it’s meant to do in the show, it has plenty of colorful buttons and rounded corners, plus two gauges at the top that I imagined could control lighting brightness. That became the foundation for my design.

Next came the building phase. To create an interface in ESPHome using LVGL, you use YAML to define the characteristics (size, position, color, etc.) of the graphic elements, referred to as “widgets.” I started by designing my layout in Adobe Illustrator for reference.

Then, I began the somewhat tedious process of recreating that design in the ESPHome editor within Home Assistant. Thankfully, you don’t need to know C (the language LVGL is written in) to use it in ESPHome; YAML is much more user-friendly for someone like me. I specified the dimensions, locations, colors, labels, and shapes for each button. It’s best practice in LVGL to use built-in widgets instead of just inserting images, as the ESP32 microcontrollers have limited resources, and images can quickly consume them. The only actual images in my design are the two gauges at the top right; everything else consists of LVGL button widgets.

I did have to get a bit creative with the irregular shapes. Some buttons in the LCARS interface only have two rounded corners, while LVGL buttons are all or nothing in that regard. Fortunately, LVGL allows you to stack shapes, so for the half-rounded buttons, I simply layered a circle on top of a square button. They’re the same color, creating the illusion of a single shape. The elbow dividers were made in a similar fashion.

Eventually, I achieved my goal: a genuine-looking LCARS touchscreen in my living room. Twelve-year-old me would be in awe, and honestly, 41-year-old me is pretty impressed too.

The last step was connecting it to my devices. While working on this project, I was lounging in my living room, so I decided to control my living room lamps. (Yes, I dove into this project without a clear plan for its final use—this hobby isn’t for the overly practical.) I set up one button to turn white when the lights are on and revert to its original color when they’re off. Another button toggles the lights on and off. The more buttons I add, the more authentic it feels, and this panel has more buttons than I have lights in my home. One of the gauges reflects and controls the brightness of those lamps, while status buttons indicate whether my home is in “normal” or “cozy” mode, which determines the lighting scenes in my extensive WLED setup.

The touchscreen rests on a stand near my couch. It may not be practical, but it’s undeniably beautiful. It fills my nerdy heart with joy to control my home the way my childhood heroes commanded their starships.