Use an Atom S3 Lite to control my heat pump. Due to the pretty critical nature of the availability of my heat pump I thought it would be nice to show the serial log on an external screen through the M5Stack ESP. I want to use the M5StickC Plus2 (but have to find out if it can also be fed 5v over the GROVE port like the Atom S3 Lite, don’t fully understand the schematics for that board). This board incorporates a 1.14" 135x240 screen. Would this be possible to do with an ESP32 running ESPHome and using the UART module?
I have the older version (not 2, but plus, and older than the current schematic shown for the plus). These have a lithium ion battery and a power IC that won’t allow boot once the battery gets too low in voltage.
The RS485 converter says it needs 12V in, but mine does work-ish at even 5V, but it doesn’t seem to charge the battery, so the whole thing dies after some hours.
Not sure what you are really trying to achieve, i.e. what are you hoping the serial log will tell you?
In case something goes wrong and I can’t use Home Assistant anymore to control it and the wireless connection is disconnected then I can read stuff on the screen.
I don’t think the screen will be big enough to give you enough information to figure out the problem, but it depends on what you put there.
I have a device on my water heater that has some issues (not running esphome). I just reboot it when it dies and that usually fixes it. If I really wanted to know what went wrong, I would need a device with a very large buffer to store all the data for a long time. I have done that with a laptop PC and TeraTerm saving to a file. That generally works.
You could alter your code to write values such as status or error codes to the UART port or display, but if you are so far down in the code, you are probably able to sort the bugs and fix the underlying problems rather than just report them.
Thanks for your input, I’ll let it be.