I want something so that I can detect if this red LED of our boiler turns on (meaning there’s a fault).
Something battery powered that ideally uses wifi, but obv only connects to wifi maybe once a day just to ping that it’s still alive. And otherwise only connects to wifi if it indeed sees the led light up.
I’m guessing this is doing to be something DIY…?
I can think of a couple of solutions. First, why does it have to be battery operated? If you make an ESP device with a photodetector then you will have to make it go into deep sleep most of the time. You might be able to hack a Zigbee device.
Can you get inside the device and put an optoisolator in parallel with the LED?
Or just run the LED power into an ESP analog pin?
So I can just commando strip something to it without having any other wires coming off it.
And yeah, and I don’t really want to mess with the insides. it’s not complicated, I’m sure. But I don’t want the maintenance guy arriving and going “what the hell did you attach inside the unit?!”
… then tape a photoresistor over the LED. Make it one R in a voltage divider connected to an ESP device running ESPHome.
I just remembered seeing this
Which hardware wise is close to what I want I guess. Just would have to use different software settings cause I don’t need the pulse counter stuff. I just need deep sleep most of the time and such.
Will be a ‘later this year’ project I guess.
Part of me assumed there was some project that was fully ready to go that I could use both hardware and software. Someone with my exact problem. But yeah, I know what I need to do now, just need to find some time
Just to bring someting different to the party. Have you thought about measuring the power your boiler consumes? I used to have one of these boilers (a really long time ago), and if it switched into error mode, there was literally no more power consumed.
Maybe your boiler is even connected with a plug, so you could try to use one of the many measuring sockets, eg. Shelly, Fibaro, Blitzwolf, many Tuya driven devices or whatnot.
Probably not the best use-case, and I don’t remember where exactly the sensor even is because I don’t really use it, but the Xiaomi Door Window Sensor has a light sensor that reports a binary ‘light/no light’ in HA. It uses BT and integrates pretty seamlessly. They’re pretty inexpensive and small too.
https://m.aliexpress.us/item/2255800403435805.html
For a similar situation, I went with a photoresistor and ESPHome, but just have it plugged into a nearby outlet.
oh yeah, I do have a sh*t ton of Shelly’s and did at some point think of that… kinda forgot… Good point
HomeSeer HS-FS100-L Z-Wave Dual Sensor & Buzzer. This does exactly what you’re looking for through ZWave.