So that take care of that. Just a quick read so far it appears that ESPHome is easy to setup. Not having the HE in the middle sounds like a good thing
ESPHome is very easy to use, and if your device has a bluetooth chip - you can now add bluetooth proxy to it, and start receiving bluetooth data.
Hmm No bluetooth, I only have an ethernet shield
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Just a heads up - ESPHome only works with ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers, IIRC. Your Arduino MEGA 2560 would need to be replaced with one or more ESP-based micrcontrollers.
Ha thereās the catch! I was waiting for it :)) Thanks ogiewon ! Good seeing you over here
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So the ESP8266 has two GPIO pins. That means that I would need a single 8266 for every two relays that I want to switch. I could have any nuber of DS type temp sensors tho.
Most users choose something like an ESP8266 NodeMCU microcontroller, or an ESP32 NodeMCU microcontroller. Personally, at this point in time, I would recommend using ESP32 based solutions, as they have a lot more usable GPIO pins than the ESP8266-based solutions.
It sounds like you are looking at ESP01 solutions, which are extremely GPIO limited versions of the ESP8266. They are small, still have onboard WiFi, and are inexpensiveā¦ But I personally would not use them when where many GPIO pins are required.
Also, please be aware that many of the ESP8266-12 NodeMCU (or Wemos D1 Mini) GPIO pins come with some pretty significant limitations. Not all Digital GPIO pins are created equally, as some have special purposes during power-up, which make them not very useful for normal home automation tasks. Since the ESP32-based solutions typically offer many more āproblem-freeā GPIO pins, I recommend that platform over the ESP8266 these days.
something like this?
I would personally go with something like this (which is ESP32 based)
Ordering one today, stay tuned :)) Thanks for the assist.
@edlentz - just to fully discloseā¦ I still use my HubDuino on Hubitat for all of my microcontrollers. I just am tinkering with Home Assistant at this time, and have played around with ESPHome. ESPHome is pretty amazing. However, I am no expert in using it.
Hey I get it. I am amazed at all that HA is and can do compared to HE. HE has worked well for me for quite some time. For what I want to do I think ESPhome will work better than. Hubduino >> Hubitat >> Home Assistant. Simplifying things. My wife now says I canāt check out since no one else knows what I am doing around here LOL
Something I just thought of. Currently I have several relays that the Arduino controls direct from the gpio pin. Any gotchas with the esp ?