I’m looking for hardware to switch lights and wall contacts in a new construction. Preferably DIN rail mounted. Will have several sub-distribution panels throughout the house, need one or two of these in each. So I need both inputs (for the pushbuttons) and outputs (for the lights or wall contacts).
Thought of using Siemens Logo PLCs (I have one running now), but that’s overkill and the interfacing with HA is not ideal. Rather have something ESPHome based.
Came across this. Could probably find a DIN rail housing. 3.3V pull-up on the inputs is not ideal, but would work.
It does not have the RX and TX exposed to have ESPHome loaded. Has anybody programmed one of these with ESPHome?
Curious why you decided against the Siemens PLC, that should be an easy integration over modbus and is going to be a more mainstream solution that could be supported by most electricians.
I was on that track because of mainstream, not more expensive, and future proof. I abandoned it because of what I read about the difficulty integrating with HA. However that seems to be improved since. Must look at that again. Would strongly prefer the Siemens hardware.
I haven’t used the modbus integration in Home Assistant, but have integrated Modbus in multiple industrial projects, it takes a bit to get used to but works very well, in my experience. If you don’t like modbus you could also look at MQTT, some Siemens PLCs support that directly as well as other manufacturers.
I have been reading up on using the Logo! with HA. There are two tracks; Modbus or (with Logo! 8.4) MQTT.
However neither seems without issues and just from reading the posts I can’t figure out if it will do what I need.
About what I think I need:
I will have push button switches around the house connected to the Logo! PLC (24V inputs) to toggle the lights (relay outputs). So all logic in the Logo and in HA must work with toggle pulses and a flip-flop (no switches).
Then I need s/w inputs on the Logo that I can toggle with a state in HA (input_boolean). And I need to be able to see the state of the Logo! relay outputs in HA (binary_sensor) also to be able to force an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state.
That should not be too difficult?
I can program basic logic (lights on/off) in the Logo(s) and more complex or global functions (all lights off, presence simulation, …) in HA.
I think you are on the right track or at least that would be my approach.
I would have the basic logic on the PLC, monitor the button presses and then toggle the relay output. That logic would all be on the PLC itself and independent of HA. From there, you can monitor and control the relay outputs from HA. Each manufacture is different I’ve done very little with Siemens, but it’s likely you can’t set or read the relay output directly and will need to create a holding register that you can write the required state from HA then a status register for HA to read the current state. So, you would also need to create that logic in the PLC, to read the holding register, set the output then set the new state back to the status register.
I think I found a solution to do exactly that with Modbus here:
Google translate for me.
It even has a trick in the Logo! program to change a switch state change in HA into a pulse on the Logo! so you can just toggle a switch rather than create a pulse.