Home Assistant has become Workbench Assistant

I’ve been progressively automating everything around the house and decided it was time to automate the workbench as well. Still working on the dashboard and some of the finer automations I have my soldering iron on a timer w/ presence detection, Lutron picos that turn on my lights and equipment, and my most favorite the dashboard for my test setup.

Before I turned a knob, oh the manual labor of it [feign a faint] -
Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KtcY3m6m4khsQ3jF7

Now I tap buttons - So easy, such wow -
Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Lm46LPwPc2BxhLPw5

The toolchain here is pretty convoluted

HA Dashboard → Node Red → (Telnet) → Esp-Link → (TTL to RS232) → Signal Generator → Gauge under test.

Flow for static speed button presses. It uses a HA Helper Number to store the desired speed, the dashboard updates the value and NodeRed detects the change and formats and sends it off.
Get Freq, is a function that lets me query what the equipment is currently set to and update the dash if needed

The sweep is managed within NodeRed, the SigGen has a built in sweep function but it has some limitations that make it problematic in this use case. Basically it bounces between a min and max setpoint w/ a one shot trigger to get everything started. The gate common to both flows and ensures that when the sweep is running you can’t send other values.

I could/can/may eventually update the sweeps to load a data table into the SigGen with values and transition times. This would let me do more steps/finer control but this is working well so don’t feel especially compelled to until I need to.

Next up is to pull in data from the scope via LXI/VISA so I can close the loop and validate equipment set points.

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