The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
Yeah ESPHome is magic. I set up a full home humidity monitoring setup for the cost of a soldering setup + approximately $0 on components. No subscription bullshit, no proprietary interface bullshit, just exactly the setup I want and it was fun and easy to build!
ESPHome is really cool, but it's still missing power management last I checked, which is the main reason I don't use it these days.
I'm not sure why enabling automatic light sleep isn't like, priority #1 for Arduino, but I guess there's some subtle issues where it might break certain sketches or something.
Because realistically none of the hardware used even supports deep sleep correctly and will drain the battery using their high quiescent current LDO regs, pull-ups, LEDs and vBat dividers. Also latency and energy cost of getting back on the network, waiting for hass server to connect (in esphome protocol devices are servers, not clients) and going back to sleep is only going to work for some weird edge scenarios where you don't care about latency or polling rate.
Automatic light sleep maintains a WiFi connection with only 1 or 2 milliamps, I'm using the exact same ESP as server model but with Websockets, and it all just works.
There's even some PRs for automatic light sleep I think in ESPHome, but they're not merged yet.
Same. I had a couple extra ESP boards from an order where I only needed one, an extra breadboard and humidity/temp sensor and decided to finally measure the temp out in the greenhouse. It's amazing to have all that in a grafana dash running on a r pi.
I'd say install home assistant, and get a device that runs ESPhome, so you can tweak it. Unfortunately I don't really have anything more specific than that, but I agree that ESPhome is great. You solder some stuff, define the pins in the config, and everything works.
> I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).
At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.
From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
Unfortunately their new backup support forces encryption; that makes sense for cloud-based backups but not for local (NAS etc.) ones. Requests for that just get replies to do it with manual backups the old way.
Because that means I need to manage the encryption key (which is a file, not a password). It makes it harder to do restores because I need to dig out the key.
I don't have anything I care about in the Home Assistant install to need encryption; if you have access to that you are already in the network, same as the actual running device.
Even though ESPHome has warnings about using WiFi and Bluetooth proxy together being unstable, I've found it to be much better in terms of stability and performance than the Intel Bluetooth adapter connected to my Home Assistant system.
BlueZ is probably more complex and less mature.
It's the HA system I've always wanted and the only way I would ever do it: everything just speaks regular IP, has a web interface, and lives on an isolated Wi-Fi network.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.