Salt sentry: Water softener monitoring device

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It took some time to get the right spare parts for the 3D printer, but I now have them and will probably have a new batch ready next week.

Although I didn’t really design the Salt sentry to run of a battery pack, it should technically not be a problem to run it off a battery pack. I believe it consumes around 70.5 mA, so it should last about a month on a battery pack.

It could however be much longer it the microcontroller (esp8266) is set to go in deep sleep and only wakeup every now and then to report the measured distance. If you’re using ESPhome, I believe it can be dome with this code:

esphome:
  name: salt-sentry

esp8266:
  board: esp_wroom_02

i2c:
  sda: 2
  scl: 14
  scan: true

globals:
   - id: full_cm
     type: float
     initial_value: '5'
   - id: empty_cm
     type: float
     initial_value: '35'

sensor:
  - platform: vl53l0x
    id: distance_m
    address: 0x29
    update_interval: 60s
    long_range: false
    internal: true
  - platform: template
    unit_of_measurement: cm
    icon: mdi:arrow-expand-down
    name: distance
    id: distance
    update_interval: 10min
    lambda: |- 
      return id(distance_m).state * 100;
  - platform: template
    name: "percentage"
    unit_of_measurement: '%'
    icon: mdi:percent
    lambda: |-
      if (id(distance).state < id(full_cm)) {
        return 100;
      }
      
      if (id(distance).state > id(empty_cm)) {
        return 0;
      }
      
      return 100 - (id(distance).state - id(full_cm))  / ((id(empty_cm) - id(full_cm)) / 100);
    update_interval: 10min

deep_sleep:
  run_duration: 10sec
  sleep_duration: 10min

I have not yet tested if tis really works, but it should improve battery life quite significantly

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