allow duplicate entity

Thanks for the suggestion, and I agree it would be handy.

Why it works this way now: from the start, the screen and the add-on recognise a tile by its entity. When Home Assistant says "this light changed", the screen looks up the tile for that light and redraws it. The same goes for a tile's own settings (colour, how a camera picture fills the card), the pop-up that opens when you hold a tile, and the pictures the add-on sends. Everything assumes one entity means one tile.

Why it isn't a quick fix: letting the same entity appear twice means every one of those places has to learn to handle "one entity, several tiles". That touches the editor, the add-on and the firmware on every screen, and the two sides have to agree on it in a way older screens still understand. If one spot gets missed, you'd see things like one copy updating while the other stays stale, or a tap opening the wrong tile's settings. So it needs careful work and testing on real screens, not a one-line change.

The one exception today is a tile that jumps to another page: that one can already appear more than once.

I'm keeping this open as a feature request.

Got a screen running? Tell others which board you have and what works on the Tessera website. It helps everyone pick a screen that works.

Like my work? Consider buying me a coffee, much appreciated!

Thanks for the suggestion, and I agree it would be handy.

Why it works this way now: from the start, the screen and the add-on recognise a tile by its entity. When Home Assistant says "this light changed", the screen looks up the tile for that light and redraws it. The same goes for a tile's own settings (colour, how a camera picture fills the card), the pop-up that opens when you hold a tile, and the pictures the add-on sends. Everything assumes one entity means one tile.

Why it isn't a quick fix: letting the same entity appear twice means every one of those places has to learn to handle "one entity, several tiles". That touches the editor, the add-on and the firmware on every screen, and the two sides have to agree on it in a way older screens still understand. If one spot gets missed, you'd see things like one copy updating while the other stays stale, or a tap opening the wrong tile's settings. So it needs careful work and testing on real screens, not a one-line change.

The one exception today is a tile that jumps to another page: that one can already appear more than once.

I'm keeping this open as a feature request.

Got a screen running? Tell others which board you have and what works on the Tessera website. It helps everyone pick a screen that works.

Like my work? Consider buying me a coffee, much appreciated!

Okay, thanks for all this information.

This is in ESP Screens 0.4.26 with screen firmware 0.16.0.

It kept bothering me, and more people told me they ran into the same thing, so I dug into it after all. It turned out to be easier than I expected in my first reply: the screen and the app already kept every tile apart underneath, so most of the work was lifting the rule and making the few places that still looked a tile up by its entity work per tile. That also makes it more future proof than it was.

The same entity can now be on a screen as often as you like: a light as a small tile on page 1 and with its slider on page 3, a camera on two pages, or a whole page copied with its tiles ("Duplicate page" in the page menu now copies any page). Every copy is a tile of its own, with its own name, icon, colour, size and tap. The library keeps offering an entity that is already on the screen and shows a check, or how often it is there. The bedside clock is the one exception: it stays on a screen once.

How to get it: update ESP Screens, then update the screen's firmware from ESP Screens. A screen on older firmware asks for that update before it takes a layout with copies, so nothing breaks in the meantime.

A few things that behave the way you would expect with copies:

• A lock's "tap again to unlock" only counts on the tile you tapped first, so tapping one copy and then another never unlocks.
• An alarm going off opens its card once, however many copies there are.
• Each copy of a camera or an album cover gets its own picture and keeps its own fit and name.

If you use the tile events from automations: esp_screens_add_tile now always adds a new tile, also when the entity is already on the screen.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Got a screen running? Tell others which board you have and what works on the Tessera website. It helps everyone pick a screen that works.

Like my work? Consider buying me a coffee, much appreciated!

Thank you for all your work. It works perfectly.