Fun with Apollo Automation's M-1/HUB75/LED Matrix Display | ESPHome | Page 1

round portal Aug 28, 2025, 6:40 PM

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I wanted to get my Apollo Automation M-1 running on ESPHome… that has taken me down a long rabbit hole…

I built a playground of pages and examples that can be found here: https://github.com/stuartparmenter/hub75-studio. This repo has a working esphome project with example pages that should mostly just work.

I ended up forking and fixing the display driver (https://github.com/stuartparmenter/ESPHome-HUB75-MatrixDisplayWrapper) to work with LVGL, support grid layouts, etc. Plan to all the fixes upstream and/or in to esphome directly.

I wanted to be able to stream videos, animations, still images, etc, so build custom components & proxy server (https://github.com/stuartparmenter/ddp-esphome) that does that. I'm planning on making the server a Home Assistant add-on so you can just easily install it.

This video includes some of the examples: Basic HA connected weather/clock, simple fireworks & fireplace, simple auto-playing Pong game (but I really want some esphome controllers), a radar screen that uses Apollo Automations' MSR-2 mmWave sensor to show distance and zones, and video

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I didn’t think my original fireworks was cool enough so I built an external component to bring in Chipmunk2D so I could apply some 2D physics (https://github.com/stuartparmenter/chipmunk2d-platformio)

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Works fairly well with various configurations of panels

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Fun with Apollo Automation's M-1/HUB75/LED Matrix Display

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Still futzing around with some things like these:

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Getting my media player now playing pages going…

echo surge Aug 28, 2025, 8:07 PM

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That looks like fun...haha

round portal Aug 28, 2025, 8:40 PM

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Bit more functional now. Progress bar needs work though. Need some good way to flip between different media players more easily

round portal Aug 28, 2025, 8:41 PM

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echo surge That looks like fun...haha

It’s been fun, lots of graphics stuff I haven’t done in forever and just learning some new stuff and pushing everything to the limit. New controller should have usable PSRAM that will make adding more displays a lot easier

round portal Sep 7, 2025, 6:31 PM

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Cleaned up now playing & works pretty well

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Also got the microphone working on the new rev6 M-1 controller

round portal Sep 7, 2025, 10:18 PM

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seems like i should connect the mic as a voice assistant next. no speaker though, but could be fun to make a Max Headroom face that talks to you

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mmm

echo surge Sep 7, 2025, 10:56 PM

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It needs a passive buzzer, and then a component to turn text to speech using that

round portal Sep 7, 2025, 10:58 PM

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echo surge It needs a passive buzzer, and then a component to turn text to speech using tha...

maybe a standalone buzzer and espnow to it?

echo surge Sep 7, 2025, 11:06 PM

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Its interesting as Apollo added a buzzer to every other device...haha

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I think

round portal Sep 7, 2025, 11:21 PM

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Oh hah

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I don’t think there is one on here but will look more closely

grand patio Oct 23, 2025, 5:34 AM

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FANTASTIC. I've got a couple of 16x32 hub 75 displays. I've always wanted to get them to display a stock scroller/ notification message type thing. I'm gonna have to revisit this now that I'm more familiar with esp home

#Fun with Apollo Automation's M-1/HUB75/LED Matrix Display