151–160 of 174 posts
Is this a good time to ask about a project I would like to do? I have two 220v heaters in my garage, one on each floor. I'd like to turn one or both of them on from my phone. I'd also love temp sensors near each of them. So far I haven't found a good FOSS option to control a 220v 40A relay. Any suggestions what to use or how to set it up would appreciated.
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?
For temp sensors specifically I generally just go with whatever off-the-shelf stuff is supported by this firmware: https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer - as a bonus they can run on battery for a year or more.
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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.
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The ESPHome project is unusually competent, user-centric, and almost uncanny in how well it works. I'll tell you what I want, though. I'm not sure this is in-scope for ESPHome, or how it's possible to even implement cleanly: I want to be able to make devices which have tight feedback loops and more complex on-board algorithms What I really want is e.g. a light sensor controlling lightbulbs. Here, I want the lightbulb…
I use Home Assistant for doing most of what you're asking for. This integration works great for adjusting light level and temperature: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting . My home has an ERV and I use a couple Shelly relays (one for power and the other to boost airflow) integrated into HA to modulate the amount of fresh air I bring in, currently based on indoor/outdoor temperature and humidity. I don't h…
A red flag, relative to what I would do is: "Frequency to adapt the lights, in seconds." I would like to be able to make tight feedback loops, which means much less than seconds. I use HA + ESPHome as well, and that's on my list of issues I'd like to see resolved. To understand why this matters for a lot of controllers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain%E2%80%93bandwidth_product
Audio amplifiers are often in the 50MHz range, in order to achieve good performance in the That said, holistically, this does what I want better than how I was going to do it.
The other major issue I have with HA is reliability. About 10% of the time, some automations don't work. I'd really like to be able to set state (blinds are down after 8pm) rather than actions (blinds go down at 8pm). If you have suggestions....
I've got 20+ devices running ESPHome, about 3/4 of them are part of my Home Assistant network, and maybe 6 or so that are standalone and just using ESPHome to talk to MQTT for other stuff (cheap Chinese weather station that I replaced the insides of with an ESP32, etc). I've got my rain water tanks monitored, my soil moisture in my greenhouse, the temperature and humidity in all different parts of the house, air qual…
I agree with everything here, except the $10 of hardware. You must be running some very fancy chips! For extra savings the ESP8266 might be as low as $4us. It really is amazing.
Aliexpress -> From $0.99 -> four-pack of ESP8266 for $3.19.
Even less when they have a sale.
Does it support some sort of mesh networking?
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How do you power them? I've used ESPHome previously to scrape my solar analytics for consumption in Home Assistant using $3 Wittycloud ESP8266's. But as yet I haven't found an elegant solution for powering them other than using a USB adapter. It would be nice to find an elegant battery solution for outside sensors.
The Olimux ESP32-POE / wESP32 boards have a proper ethernet connection and PoE support. Means you don't need to worry about wifi coverage or power as long as you can get an ethernet cable to it - and those are cheap & easy to find in ludicrous lengths for outdoor use. ESPHome also has deep sleep support - so for some use cases you can just wake up every x minutes/hours, connect to wifi, do thing, back to sleep for x…
They also have a wide variety of sensors that connect with a ribbon cable (they call it uEXT) with no soldering required. Many of the sensors are supported by ESPHome.
For networking it says WiFi and BLE. What’s the approach to adding an ESPHome sensor outside of WiFi range?
The Olimux ESP32-POE / wESP32 boards have a proper ethernet connection and PoE support. Means you don't need to worry about wifi coverage or power as long as you can get an ethernet cable to it - and those are cheap & easy to find in ludicrous lengths for outdoor use.
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-...
The ESPHome project is unusually competent, user-centric, and almost uncanny in how well it works. I'll tell you what I want, though. I'm not sure this is in-scope for ESPHome, or how it's possible to even implement cleanly: I want to be able to make devices which have tight feedback loops and more complex on-board algorithms What I really want is e.g. a light sensor controlling lightbulbs. Here, I want the lightbulb…
My thermostat: https://github.com/wildekek/esphome-opentherm-templates
My air cleaner: https://github.com/wildekek/BlitzHome-BH-AP2501
My bathroom hygrostat uses Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/generic_hygrostat...
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As a fellow lazy hobbyist, I'm gonna suggest that buying the cheapest ESP32 / -C3 / -C6 boards can be a poor value. The cheap ones are often > 25.4mm wide so on a single standard breadboard the pins are only accessible on one side[0]. Also having recently been fighting CircuitPython running out of memory parsing a ~35KB response from a web service, boards with some PSRAM are real nice to have. And speaking of Circuit…
Fair points but with all due respect completely misses the point and context. My comment was a reply to a new user interested in esphome on a post about esphome. You're talking about CircuitPython, 35KB web replies, PSRAM, UF2 bootloader, etc. These are comparatively very advanced topics and you didn't mention esphome once. The comfort and familiarity of Amazon for what is already a new, intimidating, and challenging…
I guess I'll accept that instead of dragging this thread on ;-)
Except...
"Why doesn't this random cheap ESP32 board fit properly on a breadboard" is a super common new user frustration that's easily avoidable if they knew it was something they needed to be aware of, and I don't understand why people who should know all that will point people to ~28mm boards. My bad for not also pointing out that "ESP32 38-pin Narrow" (NodeMCU ESP32S) boards should be 25.4mm and are plentiful on Amazon at the very cheap end of the pricing spectrum.