Pixelix v8.0.0

Features

General

• HUB75 display support added with the HUB75 HAL. Development boards with two cores and a minimum of 8 MB flash are recommended to use it.
• A lot of changes to reduce the required program flash space. Development boards with 4 MB flash are still supported, but the available number of plugins is reduced to fit in program flash.
• Removed the coredump partition for development boards with 4 MB flash.
• The number of plugins, which are available out of the box changed. The root cause is the program flash space, especially for development boards with only 4 MB flash.
• HomeAssistant blueprint updated.
• Pixelix pcb board v2.1 finished.
• Out of the box support for the following development boards added:
  • DIYMORE ESP32-S3 DevKitC-1-N16R8V with 32x8 and 32x16 LED display
  • Adafruit MatrixPortal ESP32-S3 with 64x64 LED display
• The bootloader (bootloader.bin) file can be updated by using the web interface.
• Different display sizes are supported by the implemented view feature of the plugins. Out of the box the following sizes have dedicated views, others run with a generic view:
  • 32x8
  • 32x16
  • 64x64
• GIF image support added, which replaced the sprite sheet animations.
• Serial terminal extended with
  • a help command to show all available commands and
  • get status to retrieve the last error id, which is useful in case the display is not working.
• Multi-line support for text implemented in the TextWidget.
• User defined icons e.g. for the IconTextPlugin are now uploaded in the new icon menu. Every uploaded icon has an unqiue icon id, which can be used by the plugins to specify which icon to use.
• Websocket requests are not handled in the webserver context anymore, but in the main loop.
• Display slots can be enabled/disabled now.
• Display page shows now the sticky flag and whether the slot is enabled or disabled.
• GFX performance increased.
• Web pages updated with a consistent dark theme.
• In WiFi access point mode a public ip address will be assigned to the connected mobile device. This was required especially for Samsung mobile phones to trigger the user notification and routing to the captive portal.
• Protocol for the live display update in the web page uses a simple compression algorithm.
• Many other bugfixes and improvements, please check the logs for details.
• Brightness soft limits implemented for environment and device depended adjustments.

Plugins

DateTimePlugin

• Choose the start of the week day.
• Analog clock visulation for 64x64 displays added.

JustTextPlugin

• Text can be stored persistent, which is automatically shown after a power-up.

IconTextPlugin

• Text can be stored persistent, which is automatically shown after a power-up.

IconTextLampPlugin

• Text can be stored persistent, which is automatically shown after a power-up.

MultiIconPlugin

• Supports the max. number of icons depended on the display size.

OpenWeatherPlugin

• One Call 2.5 support removed, because it was deprecated and access to the product stopped on October 14, 2024.
• On 64x64 displays it supports showing the forecast of one week.

Breaking changes

• New TextWidget format tags:

  Keyword	Description
  {#RRGGBB}	Change text color (RRGGBB in hex)
  {hl}	Horizontal alignment left
  {hc}	Horizontal alignment right
  {hr}	Horizontal alignment center
  {vt}	Vertical alignment top
  {vc}	Vertical alignment center
  {vb}	Vertical alignment bottom
  {0xCC}	Special character (CC in hex)

• To support different display sizes, the plugins shall support the view feature.

• ThreeIconPlugin renamed to MultiIconPlugin, because depended on the display size it can support less or more than 3 icons.

• Please consider REST API changes, see REST API v1.5.0

New Contributors

• @ryannevell made their first contribution in #181
• @emmanuel-ferdman made their first contribution in #204

Full Changelog: v7.2.5...v8.0.0