Optical sensor that can read if an LED turns on and send an notification

Hello all you smart people

First of all I’m not even sure this is the right place to ask and if I am wrong, please forgive me.
I am quite new to HASS and have not been anywhere near esp (yet) recently I got a friend of mine into hass with a pie and now a sky connect.

Yesterday he asked me if it was it was possible to make an esp sensor that can read if a led blinks. The reason for this, is he has a pellet boiler that lights off a led if there is an error and he would like a notification if this happens. I know I have a frient zigbee device that reads led pulses and figures out how much power we are using. So I thought maybe something like that

Now I have no idea how and where to even search for this.

So I thought about asking here.

Does anyone know if this is possible and can point us in the right direction on what to look for ? Read up on?

Thank you all in advance!!

/Thrawn

This project is probably a decent start!

1 Like

Will take a look Thank you!!

+1 for using a photoresistor. This is exactly what I did to monitor when my washing machine finishes a cycle (couldn’t use a smart-plug and the LED was part of a control board I didn’t want to touch). Just read the voltage instead of pulses to tell whether the LED is lit or not.

Looks sketchy as hell with some electrical tape over it, but hey, it works!

2 Likes