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ESPHome

esphome.io

121–130 of 174 posts

Re: ESPHome

#121

Mildly off-topic: I love ESPHome, and have used it for a couple of IoT-based temperature sensors around the house, but the thing that always makes me fail the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is getting all the mess of ESP32s, sensors and wires all in a nicely tucked away container. What are y'all using to hide away the electronic components?

I can recommend Tupperware containers. Come in all shapes and sizes and really cheap. If you get one with a glass bowl or transparent plastic you can even look inside without components getting dirty. When mounting to a wall screw your boards onto the inside of the lid and then the lid onto the wall. With this you can access it easily by removing the container from the lid. Only downside is that they can look ugly when in plain sight.

Re: ESPHome

#122

I’ve got a question that I’ve tried to answer by googling but I’ve never been able to find anything that helps. I have a septic tank alarm system that turns on an audible and visual alarm when the float switch detects that the tank is 3/4 full. There is a pair of NO dry contacts that close when the alarm goes off. How do I monitor whether the contacts are closed or open? I assume with a GPIO pin, but I’ve never been…

> How do I monitor whether the contacts are closed or open? I assume with a GPIO pin, but I’ve never been able to google this question and find anything of use. Without making assumptions about the microcontroller used, attach ground to one of the contacts, then attach a GPIO pin, the other contact, a 10k resistor (or 100k), and VCC together in series. The microcontroller should periodically read the GPIO pin. If it…

Thank you for the detailed instructions, this is extremely helpful! I’ll throw a multimeter across the contacts on the septic tank alarm to make sure they aren’t putting out 24v.

Re: ESPHome

#123
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do I monitor whether the contacts are closed or open? I assume with a GPIO pin, but I’ve never been able to google this question and find anything of use. Without making assumptions about the microcontroller used, attach ground to one of the contacts, then attach a GPIO pin, the other contact, a 10k resistor (or 100k), and VCC together in series. The microcontroller should periodically read the GPIO pin. If it…

You're assuming the tank switch is low voltage. The very first thing to do is read the manual for the installation and/or parts used. Second, approach the tank setup with a high voltage multimeter and carefully and safely take measurements of what you might be dealing with.

> The very first thing to do is read the manual for the installation and/or parts used. Second, approach the tank setup with a high voltage multimeter and carefully and safely take measurements of what you might be dealing with.

Good call, I’ll make sure it’s not 120v or 24v with a multimeter before attaching anything that expects dry contacts.

Re: ESPHome

#124
post #28

One of the people leading ESPHome here. Let me know if there any questions. Last Saturday we announced that ESPHome is now owned by the Open Home Foundation. The Open Home Foundation fights for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And for every person who lives in one. Learn more at https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

No questions, only praise. This project is simply awesome, I've been astonished time and time again by the features. I had done a complete dive into the Espressif SDK trying to implement a wireless switch with temperature sensor and mqtt and had nearly finished the project when I stumbled on ESPHome obsoleting all of my work at once. It was just everything I had written so far plus many added features and obsoleted a…

I both love and hate when this happens. Discoverability seems like the hardest challenge. I always do quite a bit of searching for existing stuff before rolling my own, and it can be really hard to find stuff. Most of the time I stumble on it serendipitously at some point later.

Re: ESPHome

#125
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generic RS-485 You can already hook up an RS-485 transceiver to the UART ports and use it today with the UART driver. Esphome also has a Modbus controller component. What are you referring to by “generic” RS-485 that isn’t available already?

RS-485 is a shared bus, so you need to use some kind of a protocol to arbitrate access, and to make sure you don't flash unintended devices. BACnet is one example, but other protocols can work too.

[deleted]

Re: ESPHome

#126
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generic RS-485 You can already hook up an RS-485 transceiver to the UART ports and use it today with the UART driver. Esphome also has a Modbus controller component. What are you referring to by “generic” RS-485 that isn’t available already?

RS-485 is a shared bus, so you need to use some kind of a protocol to arbitrate access, and to make sure you don't flash unintended devices. BACnet is one example, but other protocols can work too.

https://esphome.io/components/modbus_controller.html

Re: ESPHome

#127
post #118

I have a pet project I have been meaning to work on: 1. Lookup the local transport API to see bus arrival timings for the stop near my home 2. Display the timings for three main buses so that can either be a bigger display or three smaller displays, one for each bus. Don't have to be high res but relatively larger and bright e.g. a 7 segment display (3 segments for bus number and 4 for showing arrival time in mins) -…

ESPHome is a good start, as it provides a great framework for layering components together. For example, you could assemble what you want out of: * The display component that handles drawing into a grid of pixels ( https://esphome.io/components/display/ ) * The text renderer * addressable_light platform ( https://esphome.io/components/display/addressable_light ) to create a display matrix on top of an addressable LED…

I appreciate your response. I wish there were guides for software developers like me that are also hardware noobs - ESPHome looks very powerful but I don't want to write yaml; I would rather write code for hardware that is easy to assemble and has an sdk. I feel like that will be more fun for me to setup.

Re: ESPHome

#128
post #113
post #31

I'm jist getting started with home automation and have a couple of ESP32 running tasmota. How do they compare? Thr site explains how I can migrate bit not why or under which circumstances I should...

Tasmota is firmware you can configure on-device[0] while ESPHome is a YAML-driven construction kit for compiling firmware specific to a device's configuration. Every change to the YAML is a compile-and-flash cycle. Tasmota is only for Espressif platforms. ESPHome has expanded to support BK72xx, RTL87xx, and the Pico W, but good luck figuring out what's actually implemented on those platforms. ESPHome supports more se…

thank you!

Re: ESPHome

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great to support more PoE devices and Ethernet-based provisioning. And also alternative wired buses, such as BACNET or a generic RS-485. The other axis: Zigbee devices and battery power. ESPs can be used with batteries, but right now it's not a great fit. And the last feature: better reuse support for custom devices. E.g. if I have 20 similar custom devices.

Yes the modules with rpi2040 and Ethernet would be so great to have supported. I'm pretty unhappy with the WiFi 8266 modules I have. They regularly go into unavailable in home assistant for a few minutes even though my WiFi is working fine

Could it be that they're simply idle sleeping to save power? My first ESPhome device confused me by dropping off and on and it turned out that was the problem, idle sleep was configured by default - the device would wake up, report its status and go back to sleep.

Re: ESPHome

#130
post #68
post #28

One of the people leading ESPHome here. Let me know if there any questions. Last Saturday we announced that ESPHome is now owned by the Open Home Foundation. The Open Home Foundation fights for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And for every person who lives in one. Learn more at https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

I have one! ESPHome is awesome but I'm trying to steer away from Wifi IoT - a big reason is that I like the idea of self-healing meshes that can work entirely offline, without having to deal with a lot of configuration. Espressif seems to have a few devices with ZigBee capabilities, think there will be a way of building our own ZigBee device in the future?

Fascinating. When I read your comment my first thought was to use something like LoRa, though perhaps broadcasting your data for miles is an antifeature.
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