Making my first foray into esphome and esp8266/esp32 and so far it’s delightful, but before I get too far into it I have a question.
I run HA on HyperV, which has no USB.
So I fired up an rPi 3 with basic HA config, and put esphome on that. Which has worked great. Mosquitto is running on the ‘real’ HA instance, and the resulting sensors communicate fine with that, and discovery is working.
My preference though is to run esphome on my main HA instance, without USB. That (I presume) will work fine for OTA flashes, but USB won’t work.
So my alternative is to do the initial load, and any loads where I have lost wifi, on this separate, normally offline rPi. A bit kludgy and easy to get out of sync in terms of yaml files.
My question is this: Is there any easy way to take the combined binary from esphome and flash on a separate WINDOWS computer. Other than the pi, all the other physical computers I have are running windows (with HyperV and lots of linux in VM’s but they can’t access USB).
Will some of the windows flash utilities just work? Or will I end up with compatibility issues?
Alternative #2: I’m running usbipd for zwave access, on yet another rPi running basic ubuntu, headless. Will the flash work over a serial connected usb via usbipd? If so, I could just use another port on that rPi (I don’t want to put HA or hassio on that rPi as it’s job is to just sit there and serve my zwave stick and I would like it to remain stable and simple).
So bottom line question: What’s the best alternative for having esphome on a computer with no USB and getting that initial flash to work?