Selfhosted

What I did was flash my esp on the esp home website. You might have to give your USB permission and use a chromium based browser for the web installer to see it. Once its flashed you download esphome builder and that's where you actually make your esp home script.

You can use the templets on the side, or download a templet and then you lable what pins do what and what's on each pin. Esphome handles the rest, its not like working with arudino ide where you need the resources for each sensor, and the right board selected.

I know its shameful but wire up your screen, sensors and whatever else like buttons to it, and tell google ai to generates you a script, I promise it will work. Its really low stakes, everything is a templet anyways. Just make sure to note what screen/sensor/model it is.

Then all you have to do is add your ssid and password and you have it up and going, should be really easy to find in home assistant and you can then flash it over air which is nice.

I havent gotten into what making a proper home assistant graphical display looks like so I can't help you there. But making it display text values to the 16x2 display is just pointing it at home assistant values and referencing the services you have in there.

You can also add automations inside of home assistant that chain or work with your esp home so you get a lot of flexibility in what your stuff does. One of the pages on me 16x2 display acts as a message board, where you can change the text input in home assistwnt and it will send a little message to the display, or on garbage day it sends a notification to the display and then switches to that screen page instead of time/date page it defaults to.

It kind of depends on which manufacturer you go with, each esp kind of has its own quirks and features. Some pins you can only use in high/low mode to avoid turning on some other feature or changing boot functions. Some of the olderboards pins have very specific usecases.

So I'm not sure where to point you honestly. I would start with the official documentation that the manufacturers provide you.

I also think you mistake me for someone that knows what I am doing. I want to express how simple esp home is. You can just download or use the temples in esp home builder and its literally just filling out text boxes. I'm not a read the documentation guy, my spelling and reading comprehension are horrible. I'll follow guides off YouTube and throw errors at google and try to find a video/post about it or get googles ai to summarize it if I can't access the site like reddit.

But like I said there are quirks for each model which you should read. My esp8266 wouldn't boot properly if I had something in one of the pins. Some boards have specific pin outs, the xiao I have can turn any pin into anything, analog, pwm, etc. Boards have high and low states on the pins which have some secret functionality. My espc6 I can adjust the antenna range by changing the high/low state of one of the pins. Its weird stuff like that you really want to look over the manufacturers docs for.