Surgery in two weeks so I turned the couch into a control station

I did somthing similar after my shoulder surgery last fall, except I used an old Fire tablet I flashed and mounted on a gooseneck clamp on the bed frame. Two things I learned the hard way. First, keep the screen plugged in constantly becasue recovery brain means you will forget to charge it, and crawling to an outlet with a sling on is no fun. Second, bump the font size way up on your dashboard tiles. What looks fine at your desk is hard to read when you are lying down and half asleep at 3am.

I also made a dedicated recovery dashboard instead of using my normal one. Just the six or seven things I actually touched, lights, blinds, TV, the doorbell camera. Less hunting around with one working hand. My setup was simpler than yours though, no second monitor for floor plan. My wife mostly used it to nag me about the thermostat, so your household takeover is very believable. One thing that helped more than I expected was adding a scene button for everything at once, movie mode, sleep mode, that kind of thing. Reaching for individual toggles gets old fast when every movement hurts.

When I had my back done a couple years ago I went the opposite direction on the screen size thing. Lying flat, any screen clamped beside me ended up at a wierd angle and my arm got tired of reaching for it, so I mostly gave up on the tablet by day two and leaned on voice instead. A couple of smart speakers in the living room handled the lights and fan fine, and honestly for blinds I just stopped caring and left them where they were untill someone walked past. The one thing I did find genuinely useful was a cheap wireless button taped to the arm of the recliner. Single press toggled the lamp, double press killed everything in the room for when I dozed off mid-afternoon. No screen, no unlocking anything, no fumbling. So if I were doing your setup I'd keep the monitor for the floor plan when I'm sitting up, but put a button where your hand rests wether you're sitting or lying down. There were a few nights where even propping on an elbow felt like too much effort, and tapping a big dumb button without looking was the only thing I could manage. Also worth sorting your dashboard so the top row is only the stuff you'll actually touch from flat on your back, not the stuff that looks good in a screenshot.

Recovery couch time here too, ankle this past spring. The thing that saved my setup was a matte screen protector on the little touchscreen. Lying there under the ceiling light, the glossy screen turned into a mirror and I basially couldn't read it until I threw that on. Took two minutes to stick on and suddenly the dashboard was usable at any hour. Also worth doing before your surgery date, not after: test the whole thing from an actual lying-down position, remote in hand like you're drugged up. I found half my buttons were in spots my thumb couldn't hit comfortably flat on my back. Rearranged the layout that afternoon and it paid off for six weeks.

On the ESP32 screen side, the thing that made the biggest difference for me was putting the two or three controls I actually used most in the bottom corner nearest my hand. Lying down you don't want to stretch across the whole display, and fat thumbs miss small tiles anyway, so I made those buttons huge and put everything else further away. Also had wifi dropouts with mine until I realized the couch was sitting right in the signal path, moved a little extender into the living room and it's been solid since. Which board did you end up using for yours?

This takes me back to my X10 days in the late 90s, when controlling a lamp meant a plastic box that hummed and took ten seconds to respond. What you kids call a dashboard now took a whole basement rack back then. One thing I'd add from my knee replacement a few years back: set up some automations on a schedule so you don't have to touch the screen at all for the boring stuff. Blinds closing at dusk, lights dimming at bedtime, fan kicking on when the room warms up. The less you interact, the better. I also kept a plain wall switch within reach as a fallback for the main lights, because servers reboot at the worst times.