Raw beginner confusion...First question: do I really have to have https:?

ESPHome
1

good morning. Just dipping a toe in the water with esphome prompted by bluetooth proxy.

This is the M5Stack I ordered ( 3 of them actually):

I’ve got the latest Home Device Builder addon installed on an updated-to-current HA supervised:

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When I go to add a device I get this popup:

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I’m not sure what this is telling me. (or maybe I don’t like what I think it’s telling me…). I’m not running a cert authority on my inside systems. And don’t intend to. So is this telling me I can’t do anything with this little ESP on my local workstation here using a usb-c cable? The actual ‘box’ running HA host is a VM on proxmox in a closet. (actually two closets, but who’s counting?), so can’t do usb-c there.

I can’t believe that the ESP32 dev system can really be so limited. What am I missing here?

Thanks!

EDIT: reword last sentence to be more diplomatic and closer to what I actually meant to say.

2

This is a security limitation built into your web browser, specifically that websites not running over HTTPS cannot access a user’s serial ports. All browsers enforce this; it is not something the ESPHome developers added to limit you. As the popup says, you can still install ESPHome onto the device by connecting it via USB to the computer that is running ESPHome Device Builder as opposed to the computer that your web browser is running on. Perhaps you installed it on a Raspberry Pi? You didn’t mention this detail.

1 Like
3

Do what it says in the last paragraph.

4

thanks. I did end up using the ESPHome web thing to (eventually) load the bluetooth proxy from here. Firefox variants don’t do local connectivity either so I installed brave (a chromium variant). I had to ff around with it a lot since this is first time learning curve, but I did finally get the bluetooth proxy to load, and then get it into HA so it would read my Thermopro bluetooth wireless thermometer for my rotisserie smoker. Gotta have priorities! :rofl:

I suspect future efforts will go smoother than this one.

thanks!

5

ok. Thanks for the explanation. The HA ‘box’ is a proxmox VM so physical usb is a lot of hassle. Not to mention the physical access to the actual hosts buried in two closets. For zwave and zigbee I’m using the POE devices from tubeszb, and for serial datafeeds ser2net on an rpi3b and socat on the HA supv VM end.

6

You can always build the code and select “Manual Download” instead of “Wirelessly” or “Plug in…”

Then flash your device with the downloaded .bin file with esphome-flasher via USB from your PC. Get the tool here: GitHub - esphome/esphome-flasher: Simple GUI tool to flash ESPs over USB

The repository is archived but it still works very well. It’s what I do the first time I flash a device. Then wireless if it ever needs updating.

7

You can change unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure setting inside chrome and flash without needing https.

8

There are many ways to install things and it is not always clear what is the best way from the docs.

I run HA in a Docker container. I have esphome installed on a completely different computer. The docs appear to be several years behind modern Python usage and don’t suggest using pipx (let alone uv) for easy installation.

On my latest system install, I installed Python and then:

pip install pipx
pipx install esphome

or you can follow the instructions here:
https://esphome.io/guides/installing_esphome.html