Background:
I’ve designed a setup to control my Pentair VS Superflow pool pump, which is a series of 4 dry contacts, one for each speed. Additionally, I’ll control a booster pump via a spare allen-bradley relay. These will be controlled via an external relay board.
I have a running HA install which I’d like to integrate this setup into, thus ESPHome.
Technical:
In the Amazon description, it is shown as an ESP32-DevKitC V4 board.
I believe, based upon this thread it should be either Generic ESP32 (WROVER Module), NodeMCU32S or maybe sp32doit-devkit-v1.
I’m a technically inclined person but this is all a bit new to me. I just didn’t want to flash the incorrect firmware and brick the microcontroller!
You can’t really brick ESPs - if bad firmware is flashed, device will crash on boot, but you can then just put it back in firmware update mode and try again.
That makes sense; thank you. I’ve bricked a few things over the years, so anytime I hear ‘firmware update’ I’m super careful. In this case, overly so.
That also follows in that it is acceptable practice to update the firmware over-the-air.
When I first read this in the ESPHome docs that instruct OTA firmware updates regularly, I twitched a bit since I’ve always been taught the complete opposite (firmware updates are on steady power, with a physical cable, and not to be disturbed)
Good to be cautious, but ESP is pretty forgiving. OTA updates have always worked well for me - assuming there is enough flash space for existing firmware + new firmware. But if an OTA update fails, you can just fall back on a wired update.