Hi everyone!
I’ve got some great news regarding the BiDiWiFi front:
Since my last post, I have successfully flashed the stock BiDiWiFi module with ESPHome. Right now, it is controlling a FILO400 gate opener, and it works flawlessly.
A quick heads-up: The ESP32 draws a significant amount of current during reboot. Because of this, my initial test failed right after flashing the firmware when it tried to restart. It only started working properly after I connected it to a higher-current power supply.
To give you some background: I am talking about the original, stock NICE device here. I decided to sacrifice it for this project because I couldn't custom-build something similar for the same price—or if I did, it would look pretty messy, and if I messed something up, I risked frying the NICE mainboard. One more thing: the soldering points shown in the picture are extremely small and delicate, so please be very careful!
In my YAML configuration, I translated the interface into Hungarian and added a few neat extras (uptime, Wi-Fi signal, and reboot reason).
As I mentioned, it works beautifully, and Home Assistant picked it up right away. Honestly, I'm facing an embarrassment of riches at the moment; it provides so many options that I still need to filter out the specific entities I actually need.
An observation regarding Wi-Fi: The outdoor Wi-Fi signal is quite weak in my setup because the thick brick walls of my house shield it. However, I can confirm that the system works reliably even at -80 dBm. If you are building a similar setup for yourself and have a similarly weak signal, it’s definitely worth considering an external antenna option.
I won't go too deep into the technical details for now, but I will mention that since I have a sliding gate, I am going to remove the unnecessary entities from my final YAML file.
With this ESPHome firmware, the device correctly identifies the manufacturer, the gate model, the mainboard's firmware version, and the hardware ID as well. The opening detection works great, showing exactly what percentage the gate is open. I particularly like the light switch entity, which controls a relay. In my case, it won't be switching a light; instead, I’ll use it in the winter to turn on a heating element to prevent the gate mechanism from freezing.
I'm only uploading a single screenshot for now, since the final dashboard layout will look different for everyone anyway.
I almost forgot: these are the parameters I used in my final YAML file:
external_components:
- source:
type: git
url: https://github.com/ngem1/esphome-nice-bidiwifi
ref: main
components: [nice_bidiwifi]
refresh: Always
logger:
level: NONE