Building a Star Trek LCARS Control Panel: A Complete DIY Guide [2025]

Introduction: When Fandom Meets Function

There's something about the LCARS interface from Star Trek: The Next Generation that just doesn't let go. If you grew up in the '90s watching Captain Picard issue commands to the USS Enterprise, you know exactly what I mean. Those glowing buttons, the curved architectural elements, the impossibly sleek design that somehow looked futuristic even thirty years ago—it's the kind of aesthetic that burrows into your brain at age eight and never leaves.

But here's the thing: LCARS wasn't designed to be practical. The creators of Star Trek made no bones about this. The whole point was to look organized and impressive when the camera panned across it in the background of a scene. It was spectacle first, usability a distant second. And yet, if you're the type of person who reads that and thinks "I want one in my living room," you're not alone.

Home automation has exploded over the past five years. What started as a niche hobby for tech enthusiasts has become genuinely accessible to regular people. Devices are cheaper, software is more intuitive, and the community around open-source platforms is massive. Most people use Home Assistant or similar platforms to automate things behind the scenes: lights that turn on when you leave work, thermostats that adjust based on time of day, security cameras that alert you when something happens.

But what if you wanted something more theatrical? What if you wanted to turn your smart home interface into something that actually looks like something from Star Trek?

That's exactly what I set out to do. And I'm going to walk you through how to do it yourself. This isn't a weekend project—it requires some technical chops, patience, and willingness to troubleshoot. But it's absolutely achievable, even if you've never written code before. The community tools available now make this possible in ways that would've seemed impossible five years ago.

TL; DR

• LCARS interfaces are real and achievable: You can build a fully functional custom dashboard that looks like the Star Trek control system
• Three key technologies make this work: Home Assistant for automation logic, LVGL for custom graphics, and ESPHome for the microcontroller firmware
• Hardware requirements are minimal: A 7-inch touchscreen display with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller costs
  $80-$
  150 and handles everything
• Design work takes the most time: Creating pixel-perfect buttons and gauges requires Illustrator or similar design software, then converting designs to YAML code
• Integration with Home Assistant is seamless: Once built, your LCARS panel controls your actual smart home devices in real-time

The total estimated cost to build a LCARS control panel ranges from

Understanding Home Assistant and the LCARS Dream

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that runs on your own hardware (usually a Raspberry Pi or similar). Unlike cloud-based alternatives, everything stays on your network. You control your own data. And crucially, you can customize literally everything about how it works and looks.

When you first set up Home Assistant, it creates a basic dashboard where you can see your devices, their status, and control them. It's functional. It works. But it's also pretty generic. The community, however, is obsessed with customization. People spend hundreds of hours perfecting their dashboards, sharing screenshots, and documenting their setups.

I discovered a community theme for Home Assistant that transforms the interface into LCARS. It's genuinely impressive. The color scheme matches the original show—those distinctive oranges, blues, and purples. The layout mimics the architectural style. The buttons have the right curves and proportions. I used it for my phone's main dashboard and loved it.

But there's always a "but," isn't there? The theme is clever CSS applied to Home Assistant's existing button system. The sizing wasn't quite perfect. The elbow dividers that are so characteristic of LCARS looked slightly off. The buttons were split into two pieces rather than being unified elements. These are minor issues. Most people wouldn't notice. But if you're the type of person who's obsessed with LCARS at a level that makes you want to build this whole project, you notice. You can't unsee it.

That's when you start wondering: is there a way to build something more accurate? Something where you control every pixel?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

The Three-Technology Stack: Home Assistant, LVGL, and ESPHome

Building a proper LCARS interface requires three different technologies working in concert. Understanding how each one fits is essential to the whole project.

Home Assistant: The Brain of Your Smart Home

Home Assistant is the central hub that manages all your smart home devices and automations. It's where your actual logic lives. If you have a smart bulb, a motion sensor, a smart plug, or any other connected device, Home Assistant is the platform that can see all of them at once and orchestrate complex behaviors across multiple devices.

The beauty of Home Assistant is that it's completely extensible. You can integrate hundreds of different device types. You can create automations that trigger based on time, location, sensor data, or manual input. You can create custom scripts and services. And importantly, it has a robust integration system that lets external hardware communicate with it.

For this LCARS project, Home Assistant isn't doing anything special. It's still managing your lights, your sensors, your cameras, whatever devices you have. What's different is how you're visualizing and controlling it. Instead of using Home Assistant's built-in dashboard system, you're using external hardware to create a more sophisticated interface.

LVGL: Graphics for Microcontrollers

LVGL stands for Light and Versatile Graphics Library. It's an open-source library specifically designed to create sophisticated graphical interfaces on microcontrollers—small computers with limited processing power and memory.

Normally, when you think of graphics on computers, you think of systems with plenty of RAM and processing power. Microcontrollers are the opposite. They have maybe 1-4 megabytes of RAM, processors in the hundreds of megahertz range, and minimal storage. Creating beautiful, responsive graphics in that environment is non-trivial.

LVGL solves this by being incredibly efficient. It can render smooth animations, handle touch input, display text and images, and manage complex layouts while using a fraction of the resources that a normal graphics library would require. It's what powers the interfaces on many modern smartwatches and industrial controls.

For your LCARS project, LVGL is what lets you draw the buttons, the gauges, the colored rectangles, and all the visual elements that make it look like the Star Trek interface. You define everything programmatically, not by dragging things around in a GUI designer. Everything is code.

ESPHome: Microcontroller Firmware Made Simple

ESPHome is an open-source framework that makes programming microcontrollers accessible to non-experts. Instead of writing raw C or C++ code, you describe what you want in a relatively simple YAML markup language. ESPHome handles the compilation and uploading to your device.

ESPHome supports several different microcontroller platforms: the ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S3, and RP2040. These are all very popular, very cheap chips that have built-in Wi Fi (in the case of the ESP chips) or can connect to external Wi Fi modules. ESPHome integrates deeply with Home Assistant, which means devices programmed with ESPHome can communicate with your Home Assistant instance automatically.

Crucially, ESPHome recently added support for LVGL on specific display hardware. That's the missing piece that makes this whole project possible.

Dynamic updates are the most popular advanced feature, scoring 90 out of 100, followed by animations and voice control. Estimated data.

Hardware: What You Need to Buy

The hardware is actually the simplest part. You need:

1. A display with integrated microcontroller: The Waveshare 7-inch display with ESP32-S3 is the standard choice. It's about 7 inches diagonally, has a touchscreen, and comes with the right microcontroller already built in. Cost is roughly

   $80-$
   150 depending on where you buy.

2. USB power supply: The display draws modest power (a few watts). Any standard USB-C power supply works. Most people use 5V/2A minimum.

3. A Home Assistant instance: You need Home Assistant running somewhere on your network. Most people use a Raspberry Pi (though any computer works).

4. Wi Fi: Your display needs to be on the same network as your Home Assistant instance.

That's genuinely it. The total hardware cost is probably

The Waveshare display is the standard because the integration between ESPHome and Waveshare hardware is solid. Other displays exist, but Waveshare is the well-documented path.

The Design Phase: Sourcing Your LCARS Reference

This is where the real work begins. You need to decide exactly what LCARS panel you want to recreate.

Star Trek has been on the air in various forms since 1966. LCARS was introduced in The Next Generation in 1987 and was refined through the entire run. There are hundreds of different LCARS panels throughout the show. Some are clearly recognizable as being for specific functions (engineering readouts, navigation, medical displays). Others are glorified decorative backgrounds that don't represent anything specific.

For my project, I settled on a panel from Tuvok's quarters in Star Trek: Voyager. It's not entirely clear what this panel is supposed to do in the show. But it has everything you need for an interesting dashboard: a row of colorful buttons, some circular gauges at the top, and that characteristic LCARS architectural language.

Your first step is to find a good reference. You can:

1. Screencap directly from the show: If you have streaming access to Star Trek episodes, you can pause and screenshot panels you like. The quality can vary, but it's source material.

2. Use fan recreations: The Star Trek fan community is obsessive. There are incredibly accurate recreations of LCARS panels made by fans who've studied the original designs frame by frame. These are often more useful than the original screencaps because they're cleaner and more complete.

3. Mix and match: You can combine elements from different panels. That button style from one episode, those gauges from another. Nothing says you have to stick to exactly what appeared on screen.

Once you've chosen your reference, you need to recreate it in a design program. Adobe Illustrator is the standard choice, but Figma, Affinity Designer, or other vector programs work too. The key is that you need to convert your LCARS design into coordinates and properties that you can then translate into code.

Design in Illustrator: From Concept to Coordinates

The design work is tedious but straightforward. You're not creating anything especially complex from a graphics perspective. You're drawing rectangles, circles, text, and maybe some curves. The challenge is getting all the proportions right and tracking all your coordinates.

In Illustrator, create a new document at the resolution of your display. The Waveshare 7-inch display is 1024×600 pixels. Set your artboard to those dimensions.

Now recreate your LCARS panel. Draw the buttons, the gauges, the background elements. Use the actual LCARS color palette. Those colors are part of what makes LCARS immediately recognizable. The oranges are specifically RGB(255, 153, 0). The blues are RGB(0, 153, 255). The purples are RGB(153, 0, 255).

The key thing Illustrator gives you is precision. Every element has exact coordinates and dimensions. When you select an object in Illustrator, the properties panel shows you exactly where it is (X and Y position) and exactly how big it is (width and height). You need those numbers.

For example, if you have a button that should be orange, 100 pixels wide, 40 pixels tall, positioned at coordinates 50, 150, you write that down. Or better yet, take a screenshot of the properties panel showing all the dimensions.

The reason this matters is that you're going to translate all of this into YAML code. LVGL controls positioning and sizing entirely through code. There's no visual editor where you drag things around. You define every element by its properties.

The Waveshare display is the most expensive component, with a total estimated setup cost of $205 if starting from scratch. Estimated data.

YAML Code: Translating Design to Logic

YAML is a markup language designed to be human-readable. It uses indentation and simple syntax. ESPHome uses YAML to let you define device configurations without writing actual code.

Here's what a basic button definition in ESPHome LVGL looks like:

yamlCopy
lvgl:
  pages:
    - id: main_page
      widgets:
        - button:
            id: power_button
            x: 50
            y: 150
            width: 100
            height: 40
            bg_color: 0x FF9900
            border_color: 0x FF9900
            text: "POWER"
            on_click:
              - homeassistant.service:
                  service: light.toggle
                  data:
                    entity_id: light.living_room

That's a button at position 50, 150 that's 100 pixels wide and 40 tall. When clicked, it toggles a light in Home Assistant. The color is 0x FF9900 (that orange).

You build your entire interface this way. Every button, every gauge, every visual element. You list it all out in YAML. The button positions come directly from your Illustrator file. The colors are the LCARS palette. The actions are Home Assistant service calls.

For gauges—those circular progress displays—the syntax is slightly different:

yamlCopy
- arc:
    id: power_gauge
    x: 75
    y: 50
    width: 150
    height: 150
    arc_color: 0x 00FF99
    bg_color: 0x 1A1A1A
    start_angle: 135
    end_angle: 405
    value: 75
    on_value_change:
      - logger.log: "Gauge value changed"

Arcs are defined by their center position, size, start angle, end angle, and current value. The value can be bound to a Home Assistant sensor, so if you have a light sensor, the gauge shows the actual light level in your room.

The process is methodical. You go through every element in your Illustrator file and translate it into YAML. It's not hard, but it is time-consuming. A complex panel might have 50+ elements. That's 50+ lines of YAML (or more, if your elements are complex).

Handling Complex Shapes: When Rectangles Aren't Enough

One challenge: LCARS uses a lot of unusual shapes. Those rounded corners and beveled edges that make it look distinctive. Rectangles and circles are easy in LVGL. But what about irregular polygons or complex paths?

This is where you have to get creative. Some LCARS elements are fundamentally shapes that LVGL doesn't support natively. You have a few options:

1. Use combinations of simple shapes: Build your complex shape from multiple rectangles, circles, and lines. It's like creating a mosaic.

2. Use images: Export your complex shapes as PNG images from Illustrator and load them as images in LVGL. This works but uses more memory.

3. Simplify: Accept that not everything can be pixel-perfect. Some elements might be "close enough" rather than exact.

For most buttons and elements, you can get away with combinations of shapes. A button with rounded corners, for example, can be a rectangle with rounded corners (LVGL supports a radius property). Beveled edges can be created with layered rectangles in slightly different shades.

The philosophy is pragmatism. If something looks good enough and functions correctly, you're done. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Binding to Home Assistant: Making It Actually Work

At this point you have a beautiful LCARS interface. It's pretty. But it doesn't do anything.

ESPHome integrates with Home Assistant through a native protocol. When you compile and upload your ESPHome configuration to the display, it automatically discovers itself in Home Assistant. You can then bind LVGL elements to Home Assistant entities.

Let's say you have a smart light in your living room. In Home Assistant, that light is represented as an entity called light.living_room. You can check its current brightness, turn it on or off, change its color.

In your LVGL YAML, you can bind a gauge to that light's brightness:

yamlCopy
- arc:
    id: light_brightness_gauge
    x: 75
    y: 50
    width: 150
    height: 150
    arc_color: 0x 00FF99
    value_template: "{{ (states('light.living_room') | float(0)) * 100 }}"

The value_template uses Home Assistant's Jinja 2 templating language. It gets the current state of the light and converts it to a percentage. The gauge updates every time the light brightness changes, whether you changed it on the LCARS panel, through Home Assistant's web interface, or even through another app.

When you click a button on your LCARS panel, it can trigger Home Assistant automations or services. You can toggle lights, start scenes, trigger complex automations. Everything flows both directions. The panel controls Home Assistant, and Home Assistant updates the panel.

This is where it becomes genuinely functional. This isn't just a pretty interface. This is a control system that actually manages your home.

Home Assistant, LVGL, and ESPHome are crucial technologies for building LCARS interfaces, with Home Assistant being the most critical for automation logic. Estimated data.

Installing ESPHome and Configuring Your Device

Getting code onto your display is straightforward but requires a few steps.

1. Install ESPHome: The easiest way is to use Home Assistant's add-on system. If you're running Home Assistant in Docker or on a Raspberry Pi, you can install the ESPHome add-on directly from the Home Assistant interface. Alternatively, you can install ESPHome on any computer using pip: pip install esphome.

2. Create a device configuration: You create a YAML file for your specific device. This includes your Wi Fi credentials, your Home Assistant connection details, and your LVGL interface definition.

3. Compile the firmware: ESPHome compiles your YAML configuration into actual firmware code. This can take a few minutes.

4. Upload to your device: You connect your display to your computer via USB and upload the compiled firmware. ESPHome handles all the low-level details.

5. Configure in Home Assistant: Once the firmware is running, your display shows up in Home Assistant automatically. You can then integrate it fully.

The process is genuinely straightforward. ESPHome abstracts away all the C++ compilation and low-level microcontroller programming. You work with YAML, and ESPHome handles the rest.

Where most people get stuck is Wi Fi connectivity. Make sure your display has a good Wi Fi signal. If it keeps disconnecting, you might need to adjust Wi Fi power settings or move the device closer to your router.

Powering Your Display: Where to Put It

The Waveshare 7-inch display needs power. It uses USB-C and draws about 2-3 watts during normal operation. That's not much—less than a modern phone charger. But you need to think about placement.

Your options:

1. Desktop or shelf: If you have a desk, shelf, or nightstand, you can mount the display there. Run a USB cable to a nearby outlet.

2. Wall-mounted: The display is relatively light (a few hundred grams). You can wall-mount it with an arm or bracket. You'll need to run power to the wall, which might mean adding an outlet.

3. Enclosed in custom housing: Some people build custom enclosures for their displays. You can 3D print frames that hold the display at an angle, add lighting, include the power supply.

The simplest approach is desktop placement. The display stands fine on its own, and the USB cable is easy to hide.

Ideally, position it somewhere you'll actually use it. The whole point of a smart home interface is that it's useful. If it's tucked away in a corner, you won't touch it. If it's on your nightstand or on your kitchen counter, you'll use it regularly.

Touchscreen Calibration: Making Buttons Responsive

A touchscreen needs to know where your finger is. Sometimes the calibration is off right out of the box. You touch a button but the system registers the touch somewhere else.

ESPHome can calibrate your touchscreen. The process is straightforward: you touch four corners of the display as prompted, and the system learns the mapping between physical touches and screen coordinates.

You can set up touchscreen calibration in your ESPHome YAML:

yamlCopy
touch_pad:
  platform: wayland_touch
  calibration_points:
    - raw: [100, 100]
      calibrated: [100, 100]
    - raw: [950, 550]
      calibrated: [950, 550]

In practice, you usually run a calibration routine when you first set up the display. After that, it just works.

Estimated data shows that buttons and gauges make up the majority of elements in a typical ESPHome YAML configuration, reflecting their common use in interactive interfaces.

Testing and Troubleshooting

When your display first boots up, you might encounter issues:

Wi Fi doesn't connect: Check your credentials. Make sure your router is broadcasting on the 2.4GHz band (the ESP32 doesn't support 5GHz). Check the distance from the router.

Home Assistant doesn't see the device: Make sure ESPHome and Home Assistant are on the same network. If they're on different subnets, they won't discover each other. You might need to configure Home Assistant's native API explicitly.

Buttons don't respond to touches: Recalibrate the touchscreen. If that doesn't work, check that your touch coordinates are within the screen bounds.

The display looks flickering or glitchy: This usually indicates memory issues. LVGL is running out of RAM. Simplify your interface: reduce the number of elements, disable animations, or use lower resolution images.

Home Assistant entities don't update on the display: Make sure your value templates are correct. Check the Home Assistant logs for errors. The ESPHome logs are also helpful—you can view them in the Home Assistant UI.

The debugging process is iterative. Change one thing, see if it helps. If not, change something else. The Home Assistant and ESPHome communities are helpful if you get stuck. Post your configuration and describe your problem, and usually someone can point you in the right direction.

Advanced Features: Animation and Interactivity

Once you have a basic working interface, you can add more sophisticated features.

Animations

LVGL supports smooth animations. You can animate the size or color of elements, create pulsing effects, or smooth transitions. This makes the interface feel more responsive and alive.

yamlCopy
- button:
    id: power_button
    x: 50
    y: 150
    width: 100
    height: 40
    bg_color: 0x FF9900
    on_click:
      - animate:
          property: bg_color
          to: 0x FFCC00
          duration: 200
          - animate:
              property: bg_color
              to: 0x FF9900
              duration: 200

This button flashes a different shade of orange when clicked. The animation lasts 200 milliseconds each direction, creating a quick visual feedback.

Dynamic Updates

Instead of static gauges, you can create displays that update in real-time based on sensor data. If you have a temperature sensor, your interface can show the actual temperature. If you have power monitoring, you can display actual power consumption.

yamlCopy
- label:
    id: temp_display
    x: 50
    y: 100
    text_template: "{{ states('sensor.temperature') }}"

This label updates every time the temperature sensor reports a new reading.

Voice Control Integration

If you're already using voice assistants with Home Assistant (like Google Home or Alexa), your LCARS panel integrates seamlessly. You can say "Hey Google, turn on the lights" and see the gauge update on your display.

Conversely, buttons on your display trigger the same automations that voice commands do. Everything is unified.

Maintenance and Updates

Once your LCARS panel is built and running, maintenance is minimal. But you should consider a few things:

Firmware updates: ESPHome releases regular updates. You can update your device's firmware from the Home Assistant UI. Updates are usually backward compatible.

Home Assistant upgrades: When you upgrade Home Assistant, make sure your ESPHome integration is compatible. This is rarely an issue, but it's worth checking release notes.

Touchscreen longevity: Touchscreens degrade over time with heavy use. If your display becomes less responsive, try recalibration. If that doesn't help, the screen might be aging.

Wi Fi issues: If your display keeps disconnecting, it might be Wi Fi interference or the router needs a restart. Check Wi Fi signal strength in the ESPHome logs.

Overall, once it's working, it's pretty solid. This isn't like a traditional computer that needs constant fiddling.

Estimated data shows Home Assistant excels in integration and customization, LVGL in performance efficiency, and ESPHome in ease of use. Each technology brings unique strengths to the stack.

Taking It Further: Beyond the Basics

The basic LCARS interface is cool on its own. But once you have it working, you can expand:

Multiple pages: Create different LCARS panels for different purposes. One for lighting control, one for climate, one for security. Navigate between pages with buttons.

Custom integrations: Write custom Python code in Home Assistant to integrate with services or devices that don't have built-in support.

Mirroring your main dashboard: Use the same data and automations across your phone's Home Assistant dashboard, your LCARS panel, and other displays.

Backup displays: If you love this, build a second panel for another room. You can reuse the design and just change the automations.

Share your work: The home automation community loves seeing projects. Share your LCARS panel design, your YAML configuration, and your process. You might inspire others.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

After watching people build these projects, some patterns emerge:

Over-complexity: Don't try to add every button and every feature at once. Start simple. Get the core working. Then add features.

Ignoring touchscreen size: The display is 7 inches. At typical viewing distance, buttons need to be at least 40-50 pixels to be reliably tappable. Don't make buttons smaller.

Forgetting about visibility: Test your display in different lighting. A button that's visible in dim light might be hard to see in bright sunlight. Adjust colors and brightness accordingly.

Underestimating design time: People usually think "the coding is the hard part." Actually, design is the hard part. Getting all the proportions right, picking colors, laying out the interface—that takes longer than the YAML.

Not testing entity references: Before you deploy, make sure every Home Assistant entity you reference actually exists. If you reference light.nonexistent, you'll get errors.

The Deeper Appeal: Why We Build This Stuff

There's a practical question worth asking: why go through all this effort? There are commercial smart home control systems. You could just use your phone. It's faster, more flexible, easier to set up.

The answer is that this isn't really about practical home automation anymore. It's about creating something that reflects your interests and personality. It's about nostalgia and fandom. It's about having something in your living room that makes you happy every time you see it.

Home automation itself is about removing friction. The real power is in the automations you create—the things that happen without you thinking about them. The control interface is secondary.

But when that interface looks like the bridge of the USS Enterprise? That changes things. Suddenly you're not just managing your smart home. You're living in a little bit of the future you loved as a kid.

That's not nothing.

Future Possibilities: Where This Technology is Heading

Microcontroller hardware is advancing rapidly. Processors are getting faster, displays are getting cheaper, and wireless connectivity is becoming more reliable. The next generation of devices will have more RAM, faster processors, and better power efficiency.

LVGL itself is actively developed. New features are added regularly. More platforms are getting LVGL support. The library is becoming more sophisticated.

ESPHome is expanding its hardware support. More display types are being validated and documented. More integrations with smart home systems are being built.

In a few years, building a custom smart home interface will be even more accessible. The barriers to entry will be lower. The tools will be more mature. You'll probably be able to find pre-built LCARS designs instead of building from scratch.

But there's something special about building it yourself. You understand every element. You can customize it exactly how you want. You own it completely.

Conclusion: Bringing Your Sci-Fi Dreams to Life

Building a Star Trek LCARS control panel isn't a practical project. There are easier ways to control your smart home. But it is a rewarding project that combines multiple disciplines: home automation, embedded systems, graphic design, and web technologies. You learn things at each step.

The hardware is affordable and widely available. The software is open-source and well-documented. The communities are helpful and welcoming. The barrier to entry is lower than it's ever been.

If you're the kind of person who's dreamed about having a sci-fi interface in your home, the technology to do it is here. It's not easy. It takes time and patience and troubleshooting. But it's absolutely doable.

And honestly? Seeing that LCARS interface light up, responsive to your touch, actually controlling your home? That's worth every hour you spend on it. Every design iteration, every debugging session, every line of YAML.

The future is here. It just took us a little longer to build it than Star Trek suggested.

FAQ

What is LCARS and why does it matter for smart home interfaces?

LCARS stands for Library Computer Access/Retrieval System, the fictional operating system used on Star Trek ships. While it wasn't designed as a practical interface, LCARS has become iconic for its distinctive aesthetic: curved buttons, rounded rectangles, and a specific color palette (orange, blue, and purple). For home automation enthusiasts, recreating LCARS is about combining functional smart home control with nostalgic design from beloved science fiction. It transforms a utilitarian control panel into something that's genuinely fun to use.

Can I build a LCARS interface without programming experience?

Yes, though you'll need to learn some YAML syntax. YAML is deliberately designed to be human-readable and less complex than traditional programming languages. You don't need to understand algorithms or data structures. You're essentially writing configuration files that describe what you want your interface to look like and how it should behave. ESPHome and the community documentation make this accessible even for beginners. However, you should be comfortable learning new tools and troubleshooting when things don't work.

How much does it cost to build a LCARS control panel?

The hardware costs

What smart home devices can I control with a LCARS interface?

Any device that Home Assistant supports can be controlled through your LCARS interface. That includes smart lights, smart switches, thermostats, locks, cameras, sensors, and even custom devices you program yourself. The interface is just another way to interact with Home Assistant—anything you can control through Home Assistant's web interface or your phone can be controlled through your LCARS panel.

How long does it take to build one of these?

Design and setup typically takes 20-40 hours spread over several weeks. This includes researching your LCARS reference design, creating it in Illustrator, learning YAML syntax, troubleshooting Wi Fi and integration issues, and testing everything. If you're experienced with Home Assistant and design software, you might do it faster. If you're brand new to everything, it might take longer. It's not a weekend project, but it's very doable in a month of spare time.

Will my LCARS interface work if my internet goes down?

Yes, as long as Home Assistant and your display are on the same local network. Home Assistant can run completely independently from the internet. Your display communicates with Home Assistant through your home network, not through the cloud. If your internet is down but your local network is fine, everything works normally. This is actually one of the advantages of open-source, self-hosted smart home solutions.

Can I use a LCARS interface to control devices outside my home?

Indirectly, yes. Home Assistant supports remote access through secure tunnels. You can set up your Home Assistant instance to be accessible from outside your home network. Then, your LCARS display would work the same way—it would communicate with Home Assistant over the internet connection. However, your display is physically in your home, so it's not useful for remote control unless you have multiple displays.

What happens if the LCARS display breaks or stops working?

Your smart home continues operating normally. The display is just an interface to Home Assistant. Your automations run regardless. Other ways of controlling your home (phone app, voice commands, physical switches) still work. The display is nice to have, but it's not critical infrastructure. You can rebuild the firmware on the display if it corrupts, or buy a new one and load your saved configuration onto it.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Building a Star Trek LCARS control panel bridges the gap between functional smart home automation and the sci-fi aesthetics that inspired many of us to get interested in technology in the first place. It's a project that challenges you technically while rewarding you creatively.

The three-technology stack of Home Assistant, LVGL, and ESPHome is more mature and user-friendly than it's ever been. The hardware is affordable and widely available. The community is supportive and shares designs and knowledge freely.

If you decide to build one, start small. Don't try to recreate the entire bridge of the Enterprise immediately. Build a simple panel with a few buttons and gauges. Get that working. Then expand.

Document what you learn. Share your design with the community. Help the next person who wants to bring their own sci-fi dreams to life.

The future we imagined in the '90s is finally here. It just took us building it ourselves.

Key Takeaways

• Building a functional LCARS interface requires three technologies working together: Home Assistant (automation logic), LVGL (graphics library), and ESPHome (microcontroller firmware)
• Hardware costs are minimal (
  $80-$
  150 for a Waveshare 7-inch display with integrated ESP32-S3), with all software being free and open-source
• Design work is the most time-consuming phase—using Adobe Illustrator to capture exact coordinates that translate into YAML configuration code
• ESPHome enables non-programmers to build sophisticated smart home interfaces using simple YAML markup instead of complex C++ code
• The final interface creates a bidirectional connection with Home Assistant, where controls update your smart home and sensor data updates the display in real-time

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