I picked up about a dozen of the HASwitchplate PCBs, Nextion displays, and the ESP 8266 modules, plus a couple pre-assembled HASwitchPlates. I’m using the PoE Featherwing for the power. It seems it will have enough oomph for the HASwitchPlate.
This is great for some prototyping, but for actual deployment, for security and privacy reasons I’ll be turning off the RF and use wired Ethernet exclusively. Since the PoE Ethernet Featherwing has a Wiz5500 on board I’m hoping I can modify the ESP8266 code to use that instead of the WIFi. Longer term I want to eliminate the ESP altogether and just use the RP2040 to run OpenHASP. I have a feeling the ESPs may become harder to get in the future and want to have a resilient supply chain in case something breaks.
For high power lighting (e.g. 40 watt RGBW panels), as a start, I’m using DMX (via DMXKing Artnet<>DMX bridges) with a 24V Mean Well supply and DMX decoder for each fixture. I may centralize the power supplies and use passive PoE injectors to provide the 24V needed by the lights over the same Cat5e I use for the DMX. Eventually, I may transition this to a pure PoE setup with a DIY 4 channel LED driver that takes PoE and Artnet/MQTT/??? in and delivers dimming CC drive to the panels using Mean Wells $5 57V → CC led drive PWM dimmable modules. The Moodifier seems to come close to being able to do this but it’s limited to 30W, while the panels need 40W when all the LEDS are on full bore. I tried to contact the Moodifier folks but they haven’t been responsive.
I had thought about using the HASwitchplate as the light switch, but an OpenHasp guy convinced me to stick with the “natural” haptic feedback of a real switch. I got about 50 Leviton Decora+ SPDT center-off momentary switches for my wall switches. A PoE Featherwing + the RP2040 shim designed for it can fit on the back of the Leviton switch with enough room left to fit in a normal NA single gang wall box. There’s room for the RJ45 jack and RJ45 plug, as well as a couple of connectors so I can support a couple more switches in the same box using one PoE + RP2040. I’m running two Cat5e cables to each wall box for future expansion.