No kidding! Im certified on the Lanalyzer & Sniffer. Remember those bricks? The Lanalyzer was like 50 lbs - a big Compaq “portable” computer. I used to carry it on a plane. what a nightmare. I worked for Chevron designing gigantic lans and wans. I put the first production Cisco router in service in the bay area. in those days we argued over should we bridge or route? Remember Hermaphrodidic connectors? 16MB Token Ring baby! IBM PS2 Bridges. Oh the joy of putting IBM mainframes on a LAN!!!
LOL! A bit before my time, but not by much! I do remember token ring, vampire taps, etc.
So…I plugged it in and by the time I opened home assistant, it had been discovered! Well done! I already have a “pellet stove” entity on my dashboard, now to automate! I’ve tested an automation to have it come on and shut off at certain times, seems pretty straightforward. Now to change power levels, although that might be a bit superfluous. Maybe leave it on p4 and if that is too cool, turn it up manually…
You can certainly automate that. I’d play with it for a week or two and figure out all its oddities. Experiment with ECO modes.
Once you find what’s what and how well it works you can start on automations.
Pay particular attention to when it fails, why, what the error was, etc.
You should incorporate my sensors.yaml entries in your sensors file so you get plain text error codes instead of cryptic E msgs.
Sounds like a good idea. Do I just drop the sensors.yaml file as-is into the esphome dir? (I’ve been using Home Assistant for a couple years now and have done quite a bit with it, but nothing on that level of programming! In fact I still struggle with editing yaml files, syntax errors and errant spaces seem to kick my ass regularly! Trial and error until it finally passes!)
Mostly. Let me modify it and make sure it’s generic and will work with the file I sent you.
Been looking through HACS to see if I could figure out how you did that card, no luck so far so any hints would be welcome as well.
I’ve actually done an entities card on my dashboard with the stove temp, power and eco settings entities so I can easily change them, might do some more sensors on there if I see a need.
Ok, I cleaned everything up. Now take a look at my github files
These are the files that you can incorporate into your setup. Use the ones that don’t require physical mods.
You need to edit each of your config files and add my entries to your files.
For the Lovelace card, use the raw editor and paste the contents of my file at the end of yours (or the beginning). It will give you this card:
TAKE A BACKUP FIRST!! You never know when you need to recover!
heh…yea, i was the backups manager at hosting.com, what a nightmare that was. Customers calling, “Yea, I need to restore from backup, I just deleted a bunch of stuff I needed.” “Uh, you didn’t order backups when you started hosting here, we talked about that, remember?” “Ugh…I guess I screwed up…” “Yep.”
You’re up early! So far everything is working as expected, when I entered my sun room this morning it was 60 degrees (from a low of 35 overnight.) AWESOME!
I can see that this will be a long process for me. At first, a lot of the functionality seemed to be useful but not necessary, but I am now seeing the utility of it all, it’ll just take me a while to get there. My wife is now used to lights coming on and going off by themselves, etc. and if I break that, she will not be happy! So I will be doing LOTS of backups and trying to decipher what all that stuff does and more importantly, exactly where it goes. Awesome stuff, thank you!
Just take it one step at a time. Read the GitHub descriptions of each file. I tried to document them as much as possible. Post here if u get stuck. Honestly, this project rocket shipped my knowledge and familiarity with both home assistant and ESPHome. I could stumble around home assistant ok before, but now I actually mostly understand what all the bits and pieces do and how they all fit together.
The single biggest help was the guys on the ESPHome Discord channel. Real-time help and answers to my esoteric and numerous questions made all the difference. Join that if you haven’t already.
Yep, that’s the plan exactly. Although I am still pretty much a dog watching tv (I see interesting stuff, but it doesn’t mean much), I’m learning every day so I’m happy with that. I need to break the code on discord, I’ve joined before for different things but there seems to be so much noise (I might be “doing it wrong” though…) I’m sure I will have questions, but I will do as much research as possible before asking you, I learn a lot that way too.
Is there any documentation for the mods for the mcu? I’ve looked everywhere I can think of, don’t see any specific instructions…not going to do the mod right away, but eventually I probably will.
Im curious, did you get the lovelace cards working???
MCU Mods: It’s all documented in gory, albeit somewhat disjointed, detail. it shows my journey, mistakes and learnings, as well as the results. Some light reading, for sure!
I’ll probably write up a single summary Discussion that goes through each mod and how/what to do step by step so anyone can reproduce my results.
I’m finishing up the last piece of the whole puzzle this week (realtime exhaust thermocouple readings via D1 Mini ADC input so the fire will literally never go out), but I’m waiting for a 4 channel 5v to 3.3v level shifter chip that should be here this Thursday.
to be continued…
I got some lovelace cards working, although I don’t think I ever got that particular one going. I started playing around with different card types in the visual editor (see previous comments about me editing yaml!) and once I figured out how all the entities were named, it was pretty simple after that. I also figured out how to set power and eco mode when turning the stove on. Was going to ask you about it when I stumbled upon it while looking at something else. Yay!
I’ll probably wait until summer to do the mcu mod, that way I’ll have time to recover if things go awry, but I definitely want to do it. Since my pellet bin is so small and has to be filled every day I’m not that worried about the pellet level sensor, but I might buy a larger stove down the road so I may do it just for practice.
Yes, I read through all the discussions, I’ll go through them again with an eye toward picking out the relevant steps and maybe making a list (it’s the cutting of the trace that worries me!)
Cutting traces is a right if passage! You haven’t lived a full life until u do that 
No doubt! Once I have a clear picture of which trace to cut I’ll be a bit less hesitant. Dremel tool is warming up!
did you receive the board I sent?
Got it!!! my shipping was $10 whenever u get a chance.
Jeff
That check was sent on Jan 25th, for $10.40 from Capital One. Even at USPS speeds you should have gotten it by now. Any chance you thought it was junk maiI and tossed it in the trash? If so I can have them resend the check.
Capital One is putting a stop on the first check and reissuing another, so please keep your eye out for mail from Capitol One, it should be the replacement check.
Ok, will do. 