Ask HN: What have you built with ESPHome, ESP8266 or similar hardware

Recently, ESPHome was on the homepage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40138228) and some people shared their constructions. What else have you built yourself with electronics like these? What makes your live easier or a little bit more fun?

I've used ESPHome to:

Control my garage doors (thanks ratgdo!) Control my front gate (already had gate controls, this just triggers open/close) Control various appliances (ESPHome can be installed on "smart plugs")

I definitely have additional things I'd like to do, but I've a dearth of time.

I'm just starting a project with some other people at my local maker space to add an ESPHome monitor for our industrial air compressor to monitor leak down on the various main lines going to areas of the shop and to monitor the compressor working time for maintenance checks and such. The end result will get open sourced, hopefully along with a nice DIN mount to also be used in CNC controller enclosures and the like.

I want to build a house-positioning system, but time, energy, and skill are lacking.

My wife, who has pretty extreme ADD, loses stuff like her wallet, keys, etc. We have Tiles on most stuff that gets lost, but sometimes the volume of the alert is lacking. I'd like something that uses multiple ESP32 or Pi receivers in known locations to triangulate the position of the bluetooth beacon in 3D space.

It's probably a bad idea, there might not be accurate enough timings or data to pinpoint the location. I've read somewhere that UWB will be much better at this.

EDIT: Another project idea: Sensor Light Switches. Would add sensors like occupancy, noise, pressure, temp, etc etc to the standard light switch plate/box. Then have that lovely data slurped up by something pretty to display it all.

I setup an LED strip with an ESP8266 and ESPHome for my 3d printer enclosure. I recently took it apart and integrated it into my 3d printer itself, but planning to set it up again to light my figure collection instead.

I also built a set of inertial full body trackers for VR usage with them. Although they could use some redesigning, probably with lower power MCUs, current ones are a bit too large for my liking.