This Custom Smart Home Controller Looks Like a Century-Old Antique

Today’s smart home is packed with features such as adaptive lighting, smart locks, voice-controlled automation, and AI-powered security cameras to save time, boost energy efficiency, and offer peace of mind — all without you having to lift a finger. But while home automation is growing quite popular, not everyone wants their home to look like a smart home. Having little white boxes all over the walls, tables, and counters isn’t the best look.

YouTuber Haggis on Toast has a well-equipped smart home. He loves the capabilities, but can’t stand the look of the control hub, which is essentially just a tablet stuck on the wall. He wanted to swap it for something with more style, but wasn’t able to find anything suitable that was commercially available. So with no other good options, Haggis on Toast decided to make his own control hub — and you’ve never seen anything like it!

Instead of building another glowing touchscreen panel, the creator designed a vintage-inspired smart home controller that looks like a handcrafted antique. The finished device combines leather, bronze, mechanical switches, and an E Ink display to create a control surface that blends naturally into a traditional living room.

The hub is built around a LILYGO T5 ESP32-S3 development board, which has plenty of GPIO pins for controlling multiple switches, rotary encoders, and status indicators simultaneously. This board is also equipped with a 4.7-inch E Ink display that provides low-power visual feedback without the harsh glow of a conventional LCD screen.

To get the desired old-world appearance, Haggis on Toast used Crazy Horse leather to wrap a 3D-printed enclosure and installed bronze drawer label holders over the display sections. Antique doorbell buttons were repurposed as thermostat controls, and knurled bronze guitar knobs mounted to rotary encoders manage lighting adjustments. The screws for the decorative bronze plates were carefully trimmed by hand to avoid damaging the E Ink panel behind them.

The enclosure was custom-designed in CAD software after measuring every hardware component with calipers. The creator then 3D printed the chassis, internal brackets, and rear cover before assembling the electronics and wiring the controls directly to the ESP32 board. Ground connections were daisy-chained together to save space and reduce wiring complexity inside the enclosure.

To get the most out of the limited user interface, each element pulls double duty. In standard mode, the rotary dial adjusts light brightness while the metal buttons change thermostat temperatures. Flipping a dedicated hardware “shift” switch unlocks secondary controls, allowing the same inputs to adjust color temperature, operate accent lamps, or trigger custom automation routines such as ringing misplaced smartphones.

Additional information displayed on the customizable E Ink screen includes calendar events, battery levels, media playback status, bathroom occupancy monitoring, and 3D printer progress updates. For more details on this cool build, be sure to check out the video below.