About a month ago, I was introduced to the world of ESP32 devices when I created a custom LED light strip running WLED. In hindsight, that was a gateway drug and now I am in too deep. Since then, I have purchased and installed a Home Assistant Green, installed a few dozen smart home devices, have plans to build my own voice controllers and temperature sensors, and today flashed an ESP32 with ESPHome for the first time to use as a bluetooth proxy.
My question is this: can I use one ESP32 board for multiple purposes? For example, can I use my voice assistants to record the temperature and humidity, serve as a bluetooth proxy, and run a light strip? If so, can you please point to a resource that I can use to learn about this?
It should be no problem to have 10, 20 or even 30 different components listed on www.esphome.io running on the same esp as long your esp has enough memory and flash for it.
One of the most demanding component is the voice assistant so that might be a bad example to combine with many other components.
On the other hand to combine some led strip and temperature/humidity sensors sounds like a natural thing to do in esphome.
For most stuff its no issue. Some of these like the voice/media components, as well as BT proxy are pretty resource intensive on an esp32. There may be enough resources to install them all but, for best performance I wouldnt do that. I would do for example one board with BT proxy and then just add sensors onto it. I wouldnt try to do voice assistant stuff and BT proxy together
Other than those large components, the limits are sky high. You can go hog wild with lights, sensors and whatever. Once you start to run out of gpio pins, add yourself 1 or more gpio expanders and get more!
My whole front yard irrigation, pond pump and lights, 12 single landscape lights, over 600 ws2811 addressable leds along my roof, its all controlled by a single esp8266 NodeMCU. It doesnt even break a sweat with all that stuff.
Some fun beginners projects are anything led or lighting related. Installing kitchen cabinet upper and under cabinet lighting isnt hard and it really sets your kitchen off wirh some ambient colors around them and the extra white lighting never hurts. Making your overhead garage door smart is a really easy one to do.
Im fond of Espresence. It runs on esp32’s and its for BT tracking people, pets, or personal items in your house but at the room level. So, you can see what room your lost car keys or wallet are in, plus the distance they are from the esp node in that room. It works great with HA too.
What’s the attachment called with the screws where you can put wires in? I always struggle with pin headers and wires staying attached to them. The little screwy things look robust!
A breakout board. Theyre super habdy to have around and put a project together. They also have “hats” or “shields” for esp8266 d1 minis. They stack on the esp board
Header pins are for mocking up circuits on a breadboard or soldering directly to a pcb and similarly breadboard or Dupont wires are only meant for mocking up temporary or prototype circuits. For some reason people seem to think they can build some stuff on a breadboard and then hot glue that breadboard to their bedroom wall… that stuff isnt made for a permanent build and the breadboard wires are usually horrible quality. The ends get loose and get bad connections, they fall off and have no connection or they break off. Word to the wise… spend the extra few dollars and take the little bit of extra time to do things right, otherwise youll ens up spending more timd fixing stuff or troubleshooting issues.
Another component id highly recommend having on hand are transistor modules. They come in single channel or 4 channel. You can use these for all kinds of stuff, dimming led lights, controlling dc motors for things like fans. You can use them for things like electric valves/solenoids, actuators or as a simple on/off switch for some 12/24v device. Theyre extremely useful is my point and for the price, its a better deal than having to put together and solder your own at home.
About a month ago, I was introduced to the world of ESP32 devices when I created a custom LED light strip running WLED. In hindsight, that was a gateway drug and now I am in too deep. Since then, I have purchased and installed a Home Assistant Green, installed a few dozen smart home devices, have plans to build my own voice controllers and temperature sensors, and today flashed an ESP32 with ESPHome for the first time to use as a bluetooth proxy.
If I would define myself, this first paragraph would be the same My friend bought me an arduino uno starter kit and that was it. A whole new world.
I too am in route to make most of it of an esp32. Because where I live its not easy nor cheap to get such boards or sensors. At least not as easy as in the US or UK. So my route is mostly to combine multiple things in one ESP. But the thing I lerned is it’s more about power rather than the esp. For example a temperature sensor (which is working by measuring the current to determine the temperature) will be affected from the LED you run over the same board because of the current, thus giving false temperatures. So I suggest to be balanced in multipurpose ESP’s
Also I suggest you have a look into room-assistant’ish setups. Making a raspberry pi as a room satelite would help a lot.
I recently made a sketch on paper for a fully all-in-one smart room device with everything in it like lights, temp, humidity, speaker, mic, voice assistant etc. hopefully if I can make the time I’ll post everything here.
Warining: I am relatively new to ESP but find it as interesting as addicting… I stumbled into this topic as I would like to buy a set of SwitchBot (bluetooth) curtain controllers. My HA network is currently Zigbee- and WiFi based and I have an ESP32 (Wemos D1 Mini V4) connected through ESPHome to measure ambient light with a BH1750 sensor. This runs perfectly and I have my light automation based on that.
My question is: can I use the same ESP board as a bluetooth proxy simultaneously, without losing the LUX-functionality? If I flash the ESP with the BT proxy-yaml, can I just add the lines that I use now for the light sensor?
I have some esp boards controlling multiple things and simultaneously reading multiple sensors.
Personally, I prefer to keep my BT proxies or BT Espresence nodes all separate where they only deal with BT tasks. I do this because handling BT scanning and BT traffic is very resource intensive on an esp32 and for presence detection speed matters and I dont wabt to purposely slow them down.
You dont have to do that and you can definitely add multiple sensors or whatever in addition to BT proxie.
Just look at the esphome documentation for whatever it is your trying to do.
My friend bought me an arduino uno starter kit and that was it. A whole new world.