Hi,
I am currently assembling a monitoring/control box for a growroom and I am struggling to know if what I want to do is possible.
There will be another “brain box” with a raspberry pi 5 with home assistant installed.
The “monitor/control box” will be compose of :
-12v alimentation
-some buck dc dc converter to get 5v and 3.3v
-1 ESP32 devboard
-1 8 relay module
AND, where I struggle now :
1 “sensor hub”.
What I mean by that : I would like to have 8 sensors port so i can plug/unplug my sensors, add new without opening and soldering inside the box. I was thinking about some RJ45 IP68 pass-throught sockets for that.
Now for the hardware/protocol to acheive this.
I understand that I2C is not suitable for long distance (too bad, it would have been realtively easy to split SDA and SCL and connect it to my port).
RS485 seems to be a solution. RS485 allow to connect multiple “slaves” devices and ok on long distance. I looked at some module as the MAX485 to connect the ESP32 to some rs485 devices. I understood that I can connect mulitple device to only one bus but by reading about RS485 wiring in daisy chain make me wonder if this sensor hub is possible?
Or could i put 1 MAX485 per needed sensor socket?
Sorry I cannot give you precise devices specs as I did not already choose which one to use