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I have to say, I'm rather underwhelmed by the new large display as it doesn't seem to be telling me more than the previous small one. In fact, rather less. Instead of clear text for current status, instead there's just a small icon in the top corner. The rest of the screen seems largely taken up by the current limit which is far from useful and along the bottom there is a row of what looks like buttons, but which cannot be made to work.

I appreciate it may be a 'work in progress' but I can't help but think it's a disappointing first attempt.

First, let me suggest that if the buttons are unusable, DON'T SHOW THEM. Fundamental rule of good interface design. Instead let's see some actually useful information being displayed and perhaps going to sleep after a user specified time (like an iPhone). Having it on the whole time seems wasteful and simply not needed.

I think there's lots of potential for this screen, but certainly not there yet.

On Thursday, I received my TFT LCD and cover for upgrading my old OpenEvse Kit.

It came pre-flashed 

I love It !!

Conveniently I have an FTDI UART to use and a spare screen cable with the correct connector for the UART was included with the new screen and lid. Power and Gnd were 'loose' but I was able to crimp on the right terminal and add them to the connector (and USB 3 from the Mac was sufficient to power it all). However, the TX and RX were the wrong way around (I.e. RX to RX and TX to TX), so I had to pull them from the connector and switch them. Only took a very short time to do, but I'm puzzled why the cable had been supplied with them the wrong way around. I assume that spare cable was to enable this process and the screen connector has the same pinouts as the UART connector, except the cable's RX and TX were the wrong way around. Is there a reason why the cable is supplied like this?

Putting the screen module into bootloader mode did work, but the buttons were not easy to use, with no tactile feedback when they were pressed, so it was hard to know if they were detecting being pressed, especially as there seemed to be no other indication it had successfully switched into bootloader mode. The screen did turn off, but that was all and I just hoped all was correct and ran the esptool command.

Which seemed to execute correctly and after restarting it I was able to access the module and see that it reported now being on the new firmware. Is thre any way to actually detect a successful switch into bootloader mode without having to just run the command and see what happens?

A cursory look indicates the new firmware does not appear to have changed the screen layout at all. Now we have the ability to update directly from Github, can we expect an update soon that will provide better use of the new large screen which so far has been less useful than the old small screen?

Sorry If I'm sounding negative. It's meant to be constructive criticism. I just want that nice big screen to be better.

@kimble4, I'm not just trying to be negative. Well done for making the mods to suit you. I would like to think I will find the time to get into that myself.

For my use case, the max. current is of little interest, although I do understand it could be different for others, but having it so large makes no sense to me. As long as you can read the data, I would have thought it better to make that smaller and instead have more info on the screen.

Also, there is no indication what that value is. When first seeing the new large display, I was not alone in querying what that figure was, thinking it was likely to be the current charge rate - a far more important value as far as I'm concerned. Good interface design means the user being able to understand what the display is showing with no ambiguity.

The new screen is a 'work in progress' I know and I look forward to seeing how it progresses and hope to be able to provide some development input when I can.

I'm torn.  I love the idea, but also love the simplicity and "rugged" nature of the character LCD.

Looking forward to them :-)