PixelIt 3.0.0 🚀
PixelIt 3.0.0 is a major release featuring expanded animation capabilities, improved Home Assistant integration, new screen transitions, enhanced gallery functionality, and significant performance and stability improvements for ESP8266 and ESP32 devices.
✨ New Features
🎬 Animations & Screen Transitions
- Added full-display animations for 8×8 and 32×8 LED matrices.
- Added six new screen transitions, including Vertical Slide.
- Added selectable clock and date transitions.
- Extended random transitions and Clock Auto Fallback.
- Improved animation playback, including reverse playback and loop handling.
- Increased supported animation capacity:
- ESP8266: Up to 28 frames (8×8) or 7 frames (32×8).
- ESP32: Up to 160 frames (8×8) or 40 frames (32×8).
🏠 Home Assistant Integration
- Expanded MQTT Discovery with additional controls and diagnostics.
- Added brightness and clock controls.
- Added text configuration for font size, alignment, scrolling and color.
- Added system diagnostics and a read-only firmware update entity.
- Added button events for press, release, single click, double click and long press.
- Improved availability reporting and MQTT sensor handling.
- Added configurable sensor update modes and intervals.
🖼️ Gallery & WebUI
- Added gallery icon reporting with reasons and moderator review support.
- Added filters for animations and bitmap dimensions.
- Improved gallery previews and responsive layouts.
- Added gallery data copying and improved upload feedback.
- Added device-specific animation size validation.
- Improved Liveview performance and responsiveness.
- Added support for selecting the classic boot animation.
⚙️ Firmware & Updates
- Added an optional beta firmware update channel, disabled by default.
- Added animated firmware update progress.
- Improved firmware update notifications.
- Added configurable startup WiFi screen behavior.
- Refreshed startup, reboot and sleep screen visuals.
🚀 Performance Improvements
ESP8266
- Reduced memory usage during HTTP, MQTT and WebSocket animation uploads.
- Improved animation playback stability during uploads and reconnects.
- Reduced MQTT memory peaks.
- Improved WS2812B LED timing.
- Improved WiFi and MQTT reliability.
- Improved diagnostics and error handling.
ESP32
- Improved WebUI responsiveness during slow connections and reconnects.
- Reduced Liveview traffic and improved preview smoothness.
- Improved animation playback during MQTT delays.
- Paused hidden WebUI previews to reduce unnecessary traffic.
- Added WiFi disconnect and MQTT delay diagnostics.
- Optimized animation capacity and performance.
🐛 Bug Fixes
- Fixed animation loop boundaries and reverse playback issues.
- Fixed animation stuttering on ESP8266.
- Fixed MQTT availability and Home Assistant Discovery issues.
- Fixed stale Home Assistant entities.
- Fixed gallery rendering with small or empty search results.
- Fixed gallery icon ID copying from device-hosted WebUIs.
- Improved handling of invalid and oversized animations.
- Improved animation upload acknowledgements.
- Fixed firmware update check intervals.
- Improved connection handling to prevent stalled WebUI clients from blocking the device.
⚠️ Breaking Changes
Home Assistant MQTT Discovery
Home Assistant Discovery now always enables device topics.
If device topics were previously disabled, existing automations using the master availability topic may need to be updated.
New availability topic:
<master>/<hostname>/state
Please review your existing MQTT automations when upgrading.
❤️ Thank You!
A huge thank you to everyone who tested the beta and release candidate versions, reported bugs, shared feedback and helped improve PixelIt.
Your contributions help make PixelIt better with every release!
If you encounter any issues, please report them on GitHub Issues(https://github.com/pixelit-project/PixelIt/issues).
Enjoy PixelIt 3.0.0! 🎉