I’m trying to connect a lot of digital (+/- 5) and analog(+/-8) sensors to home assistant. I don’t want to connect them directly to the raspberry pi, so I was planning on buying something like this to read out all the sensors: DMX Multiplexer, ArtNet Multiplexer
I was also thinking about buying a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), but I think that that would be a bit too much. Because these are very expensive and I don’t want to program anything on the PLC. Because I want everthing to work within Home Assistant
Does anyone has any expierce with projects like this?
What is an easy way to intergrate these sensors?
Edit: In an Ideal case I would also like to have a few 230V relais’
I have my RPI on ethernet and then all the devices on my end are either hard wired to the network or on WiFi. That is one way. I have about 50 connected that way - garage door, window, weather station, door, motion, leak, camera, motion, smoke etc. Are all the sensors you talking about actually just raw sensors so they ave no additional hardware to allow them to talk to wifi or a network? Because about half of my sensors are yolink and that type of system has a non-wifi “hub” that all of the sensors speak to, then the that yolink lora hub is just a device hard wired ethernet onto my network -
There are separate dewvices you can but that do not require and additional “hub” as well. Be sure to check out the integrations page to see what kind of integrations have been built out -
Plus you can build out your own integration as well - and let us all use it! I find a lot of things are on youtube to help people figure out how to do things - maybe look there also
If it is raw sensors, then you should really look into ESP devices and ESPHome.
ESP devices are small cheap and can control both digital and analog sensors.
The amount of sensors depends on the version of the chip.
ESP devices come with an ESP SoC processor and nearly always have WiFi, Matter ot Bluetooth available.
There are shields for these devices, which can expand to all kind of things, like microphones, sound cards, radar, lidar, displays just to name a few. The imagination is really the limit here.
ESP devices are made to be programmed to the tast it needs to be performed, but here comes ESPHome to the rescue.
ESPHome makes it easy to do that programming and it is also extremely well integrated into HA. In fact it is so integrated, that it was adopted under the HA umbrella recently, so the forum is actually listed here.
Are all the sensors you talking about actually just raw sensors so they ave no additional hardware to allow them to talk to wifi or a network?
Yes I want to intergrate a lot of raw sensors. I wan’t some sonar sensors, submersible temperature sensors and flow sensors. So I want it to connect it to seperate hardware.
you should really look into ESP devices and ESPHome
Well I just looked into it, but I’m searching for something a little sturdy. So no loose boards, preferrably something attachable to a DIN rail. I didn’t saw anything like that when I looked into the ESP/ESPHome devices (but it might be possible that I missed something).
