Had this idea a while ago for the kids and finally got around to printing the box this weekend. It works pretty well, I need to make some small changes but the kids love it.
The box contains an esp8266 to fire off an mqtt command which switches a binary switch to start the party. Another pushed reverses this.
Would you mind sharing the components/code? I’ve thought about getting into ESP8266 stuff, but I’m not sure where to start.
The larger chip is a nodemcu which is basically an esp8266 with some other stuff that makes it easier to use. I didn’t want that but that’s the only thing i had. I flashed it with a custom script that’s really small, this could be much smaller. The code basically just connects to wifi, sends an mqtt message and then quits.
The other two things are a voltage upconverter to get a consistant 3.3v from the two batteries and a push button circuit that turns on the esp on long enough to fire the message and then cuts the power to save battery.
Nice project!
For the less inclined to electronics, you can have a similar result wiring a big red button to an Amazon Dash Button.
Those were always flaky for me, I could never really get them to work well. Has things improved? It always felt like a hack to get them to work.
I regularly use two of them once a day, one is near the entry door and turns on the lights, one is near the bed and turns off the lights. My HA setup is Hassio on RPi, with Dasshio plugin. When Dasshio is running I have a 99% success rate.
Unfortunately Dasshio has a bug, every 7-14 days it crashes and must be restarted, but I hope it will be solved soon as the author is aware and investigating.
I haven’t had any issues using dash buttons with dasshio, not even the one @namadori mentions.
@cearum, a simple way to get into some esp8266 fun is with a Sonoff Basic. Look past it being a WiFi switch and it’s really a self contained esp8266 with built in mains power supply that happens to have a mains relay attached too, but that can be easily modded to be a dry relay so you can switch anything.
Very nice!
I’d also like to see the code and components used, I have a button and a some Nodemcu around, but don’t really know how to put it together like this!
