Building a touchscreen UI on an ESP32 the usual way means writing out every button’s pixel coordinates, touch zones, and state changes by hand in code — tedious even for a simple interface, and a real barrier for anyone who wants to prototype a layout quickly before committing it to a sketch. Hackster maker Zsolt Sziklai built a tool aimed directly at that friction: a browser-based editor for ESP32 touch display boards that runs entirely in the browser, with no local install.
What it does
The workflow is drag-and-drop: place widgets on a canvas representing your display, define interaction rules without writing code, and export a ready-to-flash Arduino project directly from the editor. That export step is the actual value — most browser-based UI mockup tools stop at a picture of the interface; this one is meant to hand you working firmware for the board itself.
It’s a narrower, more specific tool than the general-purpose LVGL and ESPHome visual designers that have been showing up across the ESP32 ecosystem over the past year, several of which target YAML or C++ lambda output rather than a straight Arduino sketch — worth comparing against if you’re already committed to a different display framework.
Where it fits
This is squarely in the same territory as the rest of the ESP32-as-interface-platform trend we’ve been tracking — the board has become a default choice for DIY touch interfaces specifically because the hardware is cheap and well-supported, which makes the software tooling gap (how do you actually lay out a UI without hand-coding coordinates) the more interesting problem left to solve.