I am deep enough into esphome and hass now that i want to try my first steps into getting dumb devices some smarties.
So i have a couple esp12f lying around and would live to give them some use.
And i do have a pellet stove that i would like to control from esphome, the more the better.
Right now i would be happy to be able to turn it on and off and eventually get temp response from it to see if it started or not.
Did anyone here do something into that direction already and point me into the right direction?
(The main difference from the 12S and the 12F is the antenna. One is ceramic and the other is PCB).
The Wemos has at least five GPIO pins that can drive a MOSFET or small relay for IOT. (Yes, purists, there are 11 GPIO pins on the Wemos D1 Mini, but five of them are uncommitted for any other purpose).
There are at least a dozen other development boards for ESP devices, but as I said the Wemos D1 is my go-to board. A number of people would have you go straight to ESP32 boards, but unless you need the extra memory, Bluetooth and a few more GPIO pins, why spend more money?
Be very careful buying clones of the Wemos D1 mini. There are some truely bad implementations - connect a few sensors and you will run out of available power causing instability.
There’s a topic on this forum about known good quality ESP32 boards if you can pay a couple of dollars more. You get a lot more for it too with the ESP32, better processor, more gpio etc…
And if it is duepi based, have a look here…
I did the same and made my dumb stove smart by reverse engineering the serial line, have to admit that this was already partially done by someone on the Jeedom platform, which gave me a good start )
Not my experience. I have purchased and use about two dozen of the Wemos D1 Minis from Ali Express. Some are probably clones of genuine Wemos products, but only one had a bad UART. And that could have been my faut.
Your photo shows no ceramic antenna for the esp-12s. The difference is probably only the “missing” holes on the “s” version compared to the “f” one.
The majority of my d1 mini’s are clones (guess I only own one real wemos/lolin d1 mini). All work great and I had no problems with power even with a lots of sensors/actors connected to the GPIO’s. I just take care to connect all bits that support 5V (most do) directly to the Vin rail. , that’s all.
@aceindy unfortunately it is not based on that board.
But it does have a big r11 plug on the mainboard.
Unfortunately i havent found anyone playing with this thing so far. But i will keep checking, manufacturer did not help on that aspect either haha
I found someone on Jeedom that did some reverse engineering, that is how i found out it was just a serial communication. I then purchased a wifi module, luckily that module can also communicate local (it also supports cloud), so i wrote a proxy to catch the communication. After i found out that the wifi module was only a serial 2lan converter, i quickly sold ot again (only had 5€ loss ) and moved to esp-link.
After I had the basics going, I wrote an integration for HA
In due time i managed to add some minor details upon request. Since i was on a roll anyway, also made it available on HACS😇
It now seems i have to abandon the project soon, as i will move in a year or so into an energy neutral house, so a pellet stove is a no go
Good luck!
Energy neutral house…i am so jealous. I am stuck in typical north american building “art” from the 80’s.
Even w I th my improvements it will never become kw40 or so.
)
) and moved to esp-link.
