So I’ve been waiting a while to try this but yesterday I sorted all my sensors and development boards to try this.
In the mean time I’ve been able to setup esphome on home assistant, added a few boards and configured them first over usb, in the mean time ota also is working.
So far so good.
What I’m after is the following, I want to be able to create a sensor kit where i’m going to make a dozen of to place in my new house by the end of the year, so I wanted to test it out first.
The esp8266 is a good one to start with but in some places I’ll need a board which can handle a little more I guess.
For now what I’m after is adding a few rotary encoders to the board and getting the values in home assistant as a sensor. This works by now after a little testing.
I’d like to use them to controll everything from outside shades, to curtains, all our dimmable lights, and the volume of our media playing.
So what’s the best way to connect these sensor values which come in really fluently to the different devices? I’d like to couple them somewhere in home assistant so switching them later on is easily done.
At the moment I was trying this with an automation, but this is defenitely not the way I guess, cause it really doesn’t go smoothly 
This is what I’m using at the moment:
id: 'living_dimmer_esphome'
alias: Dimmer Living esphome
description: ''
mode: single
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.volume_controller_main
condition: []
action:
- service: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.living_toio_50
data:
brightness: "{{ states('sensor.volume_controller_main')}}"
Any help is welcome, thanks!