Hello there,
I would like to build a physical version of the Home Assistant dashboard.
Instead of a screen i’d like a big wooden board with brass needles that point to stuff (for example power use or which garbage bin pickup it is this week).
I would like to know if anyone else has done this and what approach they used
I’ve had a google and nothing came up which is annoying because i’m sure i remember seeing someone had made a beautiful brass clock style front end.
I have a 16 servo control board
that uses i2c so i can run it using and esp8266/esp32 or i can control it from a raspberry pi.
I’m a novice at programming so esphome i’ll feel more comfortable with but i also like easy so if there is an easier way to do it with a simple python script on an rpi hooking into the HA api perhaps that’s a better approach?
I’d like to hear your two cents, or even better: learn how you did it.
ESPhome is probably not your answer here. Servo control is direct via PWM and there doesn’t appear to be any support for this board built in.
I do like your steampunk interface idea though. I would probably use this as an exercise to learn coding, combine the Adafruit library for this board with a MQTT library like PubSubClient.
There appear to be plenty of examples for both, I would take it in small bites - get the servos working just using hard coded values, then add MQTT to control them from HA.
Thanks Daryl!
The servo control board has an i2c interface which esphome does support, but the more i thought about it last night the more i think you are right and i have more flexibility with a raspberry pi W.
changing code is (relatively) easy, changing hardware is not!