Standalone esp32 home assistant monitored

1

Hello, I am new to this magical world of home assistant…

I am trying to get educated/pointed at a solution for this:

I have a working esp32 programed to control 4 relays by sensing temperature on 4 probes, this is not through home assistant or esphome, just an Arduino ide program.

The program analyses temperature differences, and calculates whether to turn on or not relays and the timing of cooling to control beer temperature in fermentation tanks.

This is where i need help… I want to use home assistant to only monitor the temperatures and states of relays, display them in a custom dashboard and maybe have a secondary dashboard for temperature changes over time in a 15-20 day period.
So, Is it possible to read variables in an esp-32 program? or lets say, in my built program can I send my program variables as SENSORS so I can play with them in HA.

It is critical that if i loose internet the standalone esp32 keeps running even if i cant monitor the temperatures.

Is it possible? can you push me in the correct path so I can research more about it.

Thank you!

2

All this can be done in ESP-Home and HA.
I would suggest you port everything to HA/ESP-Home since it will be much easier and reliable than sending values.

Unless the parts is very expensive, buy a new set and tinker with ESP-Home then make the swap and you can have the other parts as spare.
But it won’t be hard.

3

Thanks, yes i’m thinking on buying a new system (esp32 + relayboard and probes) to learn with it and change the one working later when its robust enough.

Just a question, if there is no internet, does home assistant keep reading and automating? if so, what its its failure point, when the network is down it wont automate at all, right?

If it fails i can loose up to 1000l of beer, so i need to know the risk.

4

You can still do all the automation on th ESP device itself when using ESPHome.

Alternatively, you can use MQTT with your current Arduino program to send data to HA.

1 Like
5

I suggest you create the automation in the ESP as ben says above.
But yes it will work without internet also if done in HA.
However if your router breaks then it won’t work if done in HA.
And that is why we want it to be in ESP-Home, so that you are not reliant on the router.

6

Got it, so my path is understanding esphome and translate my system into it, then worry about the home assistant monitoring.

7

Why not both systems? Arduino to program everything and HA for monitor the procces.
For the price of a esp32 and some sensors, you can’t risk to lose 1000L beer :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

8

When you set up ESP-Home then the HA monitoring is already done.
So you only need to do the ESP-Home stuff through HA interface