Flash on one host, connect with another (ESPHome Dashboard)

Hi everybody,

is it possible for me to use ESPHome Dashboard and/or manually flash ESPHome to a device from my regular computer, but then have it show up in ESPHome Dashboard on my home server (running Home Assistant in a docker container)? If so, can you please tell me how to do this?

Thing is, each nodeMCU, ESP8266, etc. device shows up as a different device under /dev/serial/by-id (obviously!). I cannot just use /dev/ttyUSB0 or similar, as this is used by a CC2531 zigbee router and when I reboot, sometimes those devices get messed up (so neither zigbee2mqtt nor ESPHome Dashboard will work).

If I could initially set up any new ESPHome device from my regular pc, then upload changes etc. via ESPHome Dashboard from within Home Assistant (I have it running on that same machine and linked it as a custom panel), it would be the easiest way and definitely the best way to avoid any problems with linking devices to docker containers.

Thank you for your ideas :slight_smile:

Yes, just copy the yaml file for the device to your esphome directory in the other computer.

You can download the BIN File to your PC and use a USB FTDI or similar to flash it manually.

Here is an explanation from ESPHome site:

Specifically this part:

First, you need to get the firmware file to flash. For Hass.io add-on based installs you can use the COMPILE button (click the overflow icon with the three dots) and then press Download Binary . For command line based installs you can access the file under <CONFIG_DIR>/<NODE_NAME>/.pioenvs/<NODE_NAME>/firmware.bin .

Then, install esphome-flasher by going to the [[releases page]](https://github.com/esphome/esphome-flasher/releases) and downloading one of the pre-compiled binaries. Open up the application and select the serial port you want to flash to (on windows you can use the “device manager” to check if it’s the right one).

Cheers!
DeadEnd

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