CrowPanel Advance 3.5: Smart home display with AI, Meshtastic and LVGL is budget-friendly

The CrowPanel Advance 3.5"-HMI (Meshtastic) is a compact smart home display based on an SoC that is fairly well known in the DIY and maker community, specifically the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8. It features two LX7 CPU cores clocked at up to 240MHz and already supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 LE. Support for additional wireless standards can be added with modules, including LoRa, ZigBee, Matter, Thread, or WiFi 6. 

That means the CrowPanel Advance 3.5-HMI ESP32 AI Display can also be integrated into a smart home. In practice, the display should also work well for building a compact smart home panel. Meshtastic is supported with the appropriate module. Programming a user interface is largely left up to the user, although LVGL support can make that easier. The board can also be programmed through the Arduino IDE or, for example, PlatformIO.

The smart home display is advertised with integrated AI functions, and it includes a microphone and speaker with support for speech recognition and text-to-speech, making integration with smart assistants possible. It uses a 3.5-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 480 × 320 pixels, and it is a touchscreen, so custom-programmed buttons can be used, for example. External sensors and actuators can be connected, as can a battery. The model is available directly from the manufacturer for $25, although that price does not include a case or an additional wireless module. Possible alternatives are also available on Amazon.