Cover support for motors with actual feedback?

ESPHome
1

I’m building a sort of automatic cable winder/extender. It uses a DC motor through an H-bridge. The motor also has a rotary quadrature encoder, which is nice for feedback/monitoring.
In my mind, it makes most sense to integrate this as a cover - extend, retract, stop, see position. But I was surprised to see how little support there is for this:

  1. there’s a an H-bridge fan component, but I couldn’t find a cover variant. Using an H-bridge seems like a really obvious way of making a cover, is there really no support in ESPHome?
  2. there’s a a feedback cover component, but it seems to only have endstop support. Instead, “in all the cases the current position is approximated with the time the cover has been moving”, which is the opposite of feedback. Is there a way to replace this approximation with actual position from the encoder?
  3. there a PID controller for climate, but none that I could find for movement. I suppose it could be implemented as a script/automation on the encoder, but maybe there’s some smart thing done already (this is a bit of a luxury item, but since we’re on this list, why not?)

Given how obvious these use-cases are, I suspect someone has already implemented something, but I just can’t find anything. Any suggestions welcome!

2

Pretty sure you could achieve this with a template cover.

Haven’t done it myself, but it seems like you should be able to set the position:

position (Optional, templatable, float): The position to publish, from 0 (CLOSED) to 1.0 (OPEN)

Admittedly, the docs seems less than clear to me but my reading of it implies what you want to do is possible.

3

A lot of people make the same wrong conclusion. They think there should be a ready-made integration for the endless number of things you can build. Thats silly to even think that. What they do really well is they peovide you with the key components people will most likely need and then we the users can tailer it to our specific needs. So, you looked through everything from fan to climate and you looked at all the cover components but you somehow missed the one you do need. Template Cover — ESPHome