Flipdot for Home Assistant

A full Home Assistant integration for fluepdot flip-dot displays

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fluepdot hangs a real, mechanical flip-dot display — the kind of clattering dot-matrix panel that used to sit above bus doors — directly off Home Assistant. Not "one switch that sends a string": a device, entities, live preview, a priority queue, quiet hours, and thirteen actions to draw text, bars, icons, marquees and raw frames on it.

_{The image.flipdot_preview entity mirrors whatever is physically flipped on the board right now.}

Before you read on: how this came to be

This integration was written almost entirely by an AI (Claude, via Claude Code) for my own flip-dot display at home. I described what I wanted, reviewed the result, tested it against the real hardware, and pushed it. I'm not a Home Assistant integration developer, and I won't pretend otherwise.

It works well for me — the whole thing has been exercised live against a real fluepboard, including the priority queue, quiet hours, font extraction and the render pipeline. If it's useful to you too, great, help yourself. If you find a bug or it doesn't work with your setup, please open an issue — I'll look at it when I can, but there's no support contract behind this, and pull requests are very welcome if you'd rather fix it yourself.

What you need

• A fluepdot flip-dot display: the fluepboard controller (ESP32-based) driving one or more flip-dot panels, running the stock fluepdot firmware. This integration talks to the firmware's built-in HTTP API — it does not replace or modify the firmware.
• The board reachable over HTTP from your Home Assistant instance (same LAN/VLAN). The firmware has no authentication, so keep it on a network segment you trust.
• Home Assistant 2024.6 or newer. Developed and tested against 2026.8.

Installation

Via HACS (recommended)

This integration isn't in the default HACS catalog, so add it as a custom repository:

1. HACS → the ⋮ menu (top right) → Custom repositories.
2. Repository: https://github.com/Subnet-Zero/fluepdot-ha, category: Integration.
3. Find Flipdot (fluepdot) in HACS and install it.
4. Restart Home Assistant.

Manually

Copy custom_components/fluepdot from this repository into your Home Assistant config/custom_components/ folder, then restart Home Assistant.

Setup

Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → "Flipdot", then enter the board's host or IP address (e.g. 10.0.0.164). Home Assistant confirms the connection by reading the current framebuffer, which also tells it the display's actual size — nothing to configure by hand.

What you get

One device, 24 entities:

Entity	What it does
image.flipdot_preview	Live PNG snapshot of whatever is currently on the board
text.flipdot_message	Free-text field — whatever you type gets shown
select.flipdot_mode	rotation · date · manual · off
select.flipdot_font / select.flipdot_alignment	Default font and text alignment
switch.flipdot_display	Display on/off (off = blank, and stops writing anything)
switch.flipdot_quiet_hours	Enable/disable the quiet-hours gate
time.flipdot_quiet_hours_start / time.flipdot_quiet_hours_end	Quiet hours as entities — editable from the dashboard or an automation
switch.flipdot_differential_rendering	Toggle the firmware's differential draw mode
number.flipdot_rotation_interval / number.flipdot_set_delay	Seconds per rotation page · per-column drive timing
sensor.flipdot_content	What's showing right now, with source, priority, expiry and counters as attributes
sensor.flipdot_pixels_on / sensor.flipdot_page	Diagnostics
binary_sensor.flipdot_online / binary_sensor.flipdot_foreign_content / binary_sensor.flipdot_quiet_hours	Connectivity · someone else wrote to the board · quiet hours active
button.flipdot_clear / button.flipdot_date / button.flipdot_test_pattern / button.flipdot_invert / button.flipdot_exercise_pixels	One-shot actions, including a pixel-exercise routine against stuck dots
notify.flipdot_notification	The board as a regular notification target (notify.send_message)

Actions

fluepdot.send_text · send_lines · marquee · draw · draw_bar · set_pixel · clear_pixel · clear · effect (wipe / dissolve / matrix / blink / snow / invert) · show_page · reload_pages · extract_fonts · set_rendering_timings — all with UI selectors, so they're usable straight from the Developer Tools → Actions tab without writing YAML.

Two render paths, picked automatically or explicitly via mode:

• device — the board renders its own built-in fonts, exactly like calling its HTTP API directly. Fast, matches the firmware's native look.
• compose — Home Assistant builds the full 115×16 (or whatever your panel size is) frame in Python and sends it in one shot. This is what makes centering, multi-line text, icons, bars and word wrap possible — the firmware's own renderer can't do any of that.

Anything with align other than left automatically upgrades to compose, since the firmware has no concept of alignment on its own.

Rotation pages: fluepdot_pages.yaml

On first start the integration writes fluepdot_pages.yaml into your Home Assistant config directory, with one active page (today's date) and a handful of disabled examples (clock, next trash pickup, weather, PV power with a bar, "laundry done"). Each page is a small block of Jinja templates:

pages:
  - id: date
    name: Date
    enabled: true
    duration: 60
    mode: device
    font: DejaVuSans12bw_bwfont
    text: >
      {{ now().strftime('%a, %d %B') }}

  - id: weather
    name: Weather
    enabled: false
    duration: 30
    mode: compose
    align: center
    lines:
      - "{{ state_attr('weather.home','temperature') | round(0) }}°"
      - "{{ states('weather.home') }}"

Edit the file, then call fluepdot.reload_pages — no restart needed. A page can carry a Jinja condition (only shown when true), an icon, and a bar block for a progress bar.

Priority and quiet hours

Four levels — background (rotation) < normal < high < alarm. A message at a given priority can only be replaced by one of equal or higher priority; once its duration runs out, the display falls back to rotation on its own.

Quiet hours are hard: between time.flipdot_quiet_hours_start and time.flipdot_quiet_hours_end, nothing gets written at all — not even alarm priority — and suppressed messages are dropped rather than queued up for when quiet hours end. A flip-dot display is audible, and 6:30 AM is not the time to replay everything that happened overnight.

Known quirks (of the firmware, not this integration)

• POST /pixel doesn't actually flip a dot, even though the firmware answers with HTTP 200 and GET /pixel reports the new value. fluepdot.set_pixel / clear_pixel work around this by rewriting the whole framebuffer instead of poking a single coordinate.
• There's no authentication and no endpoint to clear the whole display in one call — this integration is the only thing that should be writing to the board if you want predictable behavior. binary_sensor.flipdot_foreign_content flags it when something else writes anyway.
• fluepdot.extract_fonts measures the firmware's built-in fonts by rendering every character once and reading the frame back. It clatters for several minutes, so it never runs on its own — only when you call it.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — for a bug report, the board's firmware version and whatever's in sensor.flipdot_content's attributes at the time usually helps. This project doesn't come with a roadmap; it does what my own display needed.

License

MIT — do what you like with it.