A web-configurable touchscreen remote control for live venues. Build a custom control surface from any browser, then drive any OSC-compatible device (mixing consoles, show control, Bluetooth audio receivers), Shelly Gen2+ smart-home devices, and Home Assistant entities — all from one wall-mounted touchscreen.
Venue Commander turns a touchscreen panel into a customisable remote control for your show. Set up pages, widgets, and target devices from any browser; the touchscreen is what your operators actually touch on the night. Nothing on the panel is hard-coded — a layout is just a configuration file you can save, edit, and re-load. The same setup works on a 4.3″ or 7″ touch display, and an optional second board adds Bluetooth audio playback into the rig.
Design your control surface in the browser. Up to 8 pages, each with its own grid of widgets. No firmware changes when a show needs a different layout.
Talk to any OSC-compatible device, with built-in presets for popular ones: Behringer Wing, X32/M32, QLab, BT Esparagus, and a generic OSC profile for everything else. Bidirectional — fader positions and mute states sync back to the touchscreen.
Control Shelly switches, dimmers, covers, and RGB lights directly. State changes from the device push back to the touchscreen in real time. Group multiple devices into gangs for synchronised whole-zone control.
Drive any Home Assistant entity from the touchscreen — lights, switches, scenes, scripts, media players, covers, fans — with one Long-Lived Access Token and a paste-in entity ID. Live state updates flow back through Home Assistant.
Lock individual pages behind 4-digit PINs — up to 10 PINs per page. Useful for keeping “house” pages public and engineer pages private. Optional auto-return to the public page after a configurable wall-clock timeout.
Add the optional audio board and the touchscreen gains a Bluetooth audio receiver with show-mode lock, paired-device management, volume sync, transport controls (play/pause/next/prev), and optional line-in mixing — all controllable from the same web UI as everything else.
Update firmware (and the optional audio-board firmware) wirelessly via the web UI. Automatic rollback if a new version fails to start. The web UI can be updated independently of the firmware.
Bouncing-logo screensaver with configurable inactivity timeout, optional anti-burn-in cycle, and an optional “home screensaver” mode that always lands on a public page when the screensaver wakes.
Nine configurable colours: background, status bar, cell fill, accent, on/off states, fader track, text. Persisted across reboots.
The same web UI and configuration works on every supported board. Pick the one that fits your install — your saved layouts move with you if you change boards later.
| Board | Display | Network | Max endpoints |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waveshare ESP32-P4 7″ | 1024×600 touch | WiFi + Ethernet/PoE | 25 |
| Waveshare ESP32-S3 4.3″ | 800×480 touch | WiFi | 25 |
| WT32-SC01-Plus | 480×320 touch | WiFi | 8 |
| Audio Board (optional) | — | Pairs over Bluetooth | Connects to any controller above |
The same configuration (WiFi credentials, endpoints, layouts, themes) is portable across boards — export your layout from one device, import it on another, and everything works the same way.
Venue Commander has two independent ways to handle Bluetooth audio:
An optional second board that sits next to the touchscreen and adds Bluetooth audio playback, transport controls, volume sync, paired-device management, show-mode lock, and optional line-in mixing. It appears in the web UI as a built-in audio device — you place widgets like “BT Volume”, “Now Playing”, “Play/Pause”, “Kick”, and “Show Mode” the same way you place any other widget. See the Audio Board guide.
If you'd rather have the audio path live on a separate, network-connected box, the Sonocotta Esparagus HiFi MediaLink can be loaded with custom firmware and controlled from the touchscreen the same way. Use this when audio needs to be somewhere the touchscreen isn't — e.g. backstage feeding FOH, or multiple receivers fed by one touchscreen. See the BT Esparagus guide.
The built-in Audio Board's Bluetooth receiver features — show mode, paired-device management, transport metadata, the remote-control surface — were originally developed for the BT Esparagus project on Sonocotta's Esparagus HiFi MediaLink hardware. Thanks to Sonocotta for the board that the feature set was first built on.