Conditional tiles, and a free-form content block

I'm running Tessera on two Guition 10.1" screens (a jc8012p4a1v2 in the kitchen and another in the living room) plus a 4". They've become the main glanceable surface in the house, which is exactly what I wanted — thank you for the project.

Living with them has surfaced two gaps that are really the same underlying problem: a screen on a wall should tell you what needs your attention, not present a list of states and leave you to work it out. Reading the dashboard should take almost no effort.

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1. Conditional tiles — show a tile only when it's relevant

Today every tile is bound to an entity at config time and always renders. That means anything occasionally interesting has to be permanently visible.

A concrete example from my kitchen page. I want to know when an appliance needs me:

• Dishwasher needs emptying
• Dishwasher needs rinse aid
• Washing finished, needs hanging
• Bin goes out tonight

Right now that's four permanent tiles, and almost always all four are irrelevant. They're noise 95% of the time, and because they're always there you stop reading them — which means you also miss them on the one day they matter.

What would help

An optional visibility rule per tile. Even something simple would transform this:

• Show when the tile's entity is in state X (or not in state Y)
• Show when the value is above/below a threshold
• Show when another entity is in a given state

A template-based condition would be the most flexible, but a simple state/threshold match would cover most of what I need.

Tiles that hide would ideally reflow so the page doesn't leave holes.

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2. A free-form content block (like Lovelace's Markdown card)

The second gap is that every piece of information has to be an entity in a card. Some information isn't one value — it's a small explanation, or a comparison, or a couple of related numbers that only make sense together.

I have an energy management layer that decides overnight battery charge targets. In Lovelace I show it as a Markdown card: a heading, a small two-column table (planned vs applied), a sentence of plain-English reasoning with the key numbers in bold, and a status line. (Screenshot attached.)

It's genuinely useful because it reads as a short briefing rather than six disconnected values. There's currently no way to put anything like that on a Tessera screen — I'd have to decompose it into six sensor tiles and lose the thing that makes it readable.

What would help

A content block tile that renders templated markdown, spanning a configurable number of cells — the Tessera equivalent of Lovelace's Markdown card. Headings, bold, and simple tables would cover the great majority of cases.

This would also be the natural answer to request 1 for text: a block that renders empty when there's nothing to say, and disappears.

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Why these two together

Combined, they'd let a page be mostly quiet and speak up when it matters: ambient information that's always there (time, temperature, camera, lights), one content block that summarises what needs doing, and conditional tiles for the occasional exception.

Happy to test builds on V2 hardware — I've done so before on #92.