This started as a hobby project, made for fun, and that spirit shows all the way through. The maker wanted a small touchscreen controller for the desk and picked a very affordable ESP32-S3 board, the Guition JC3248W535 with a 3.5 inch display, which reportedly costs around $25. The software, called TouchDeck, is free and open source, with the code on GitHub and a web flasher for easy installation.
What stands out is how much the little screen actually does. It connects to Home Assistant and runs a multi-page dashboard: swiping sideways moves between pages, and swiping down reveals a system overlay with brightness sliders for both the screen and a light. A long press opens extra controls such as brightness or volume. From the desk, the maker can operate lights, switches, covers, scenes and scripts, and the screen displays sensor values too.
Some pages go well beyond basic home control. There is PC telemetry with CPU and GPU usage graphs, fan and pump speeds, temperatures, wattage and network rates, plus 3D printing status showing nozzle, bed and chamber temperatures, power draw and elapsed time, and even filament spool inventories across multiple AMS units with level bars and humidity readings. A companion exe app feeds the PC stats. Everything is configured from a web page on the device itself, so no YAML editing is needed, and it works locally. The interface is built with LVGL version 9, and the tile animations use standard LVGL animations with some custom drawing on top.
The maker admits there are probably still some bugs and asks for feedback from anyone who tries it. That openness seems healthy for a project like this.