I’m looking into starting with Home assistant. Use cases I would like to cover are:
- monitor solar panels -repalce app from manufacturer (integration of solax inverter seems possible)
- control velux sun shades via klf
- log/ monitor/show a number of sensors (water level in rain water tank, etc)
There is however one very important use case, I would have to solve from the start.
In order to improve home use of the electricity of our solar panels, I have today a python script running on a raspberry pi (no home assistant) which listens to the P1 port of our digital electricity meter, and if electricity is going from our house to the grid, a led connected to the gpio is set to green, with its intensity indicating how much current is going out. If we are using external power, the led is red. This led allows us to immediatly see, without using our phone or tablet, if we should increase our self use (for instance lauch the dishwasher,…).
The led is in our hall, where we regularly walk by, or where you can easily take a quick look, as the color of the led can be observed from a distance. In addition, it is low power. No need for an app, no need to activate a wall mounted screen, etc
It is extremely simple in setup and use. It really helps and we really like to keep this functionality.
If we move to HA, we would like to have something equivalent (or identical)
It is my understanding that gpio is no longer supported in HA on raspberry pi or odroid.
I used this forum and google to look for a solution, and obviously, I do find a lot of options on controlling rgb lights, rgb led strips, simple displays, esphome, etc I find so many things that I can no longer see the forest through the trees. I did not find something easy, compact, low power and fairly standard (not requiring to much soldering, integration, studying of new things…).
Does someone have an idea on how to solve this use case?
ps: keeping the old system in parallel to HA is not an option, as there is only one P1 port on the meter, as the current script needs some improvement anyhow and as I would like to free the raspberry pi currently in use. Running HA in parallel on the same raspberry pi seems unnecessary complex.