Has anyone a working YAML and bin file or monitoring gas usage using an ESP32 and qmc5883l module that they wouldn’t mind my poaching? I spent all day yesterday trying to get it right, using both ChatGPT and Copilot, and both kept giving me tweaks that threw error after error. Help?
Have you tried searching the forum for ‘qmc5883l gas meter’? Several threads with folks who have done exactly this.
Strong advice of just don’t waste your time with this approach. It will mostly lead you astray and even if it works, you won’t have learned the why/how.
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Thing is, I’m so new to Home Assistant in general and to YAMLs and coding in particular, I need step-by-step instructions, as though I were an 8-year-old!
And I take your point about using AI…I’ve had good results troubleshooting various things, but yes, it was singularly unhelpful in this case!
That particular project has quite detailed instructions and is what I’d recommend (I did something very similar with my gas meter, but it was before that project came out and is a lot more ‘manual’ in it’s setup.). If it’s overwhelming you (and if this is your first time with ESPHome, then that’s what I’d expect), I would highly recommend starting with a simpler ESPHome project. It’s really up to your imagination, but even a simple ‘smart’ button/switch project would allow you to start getting familiar with things. While ESPHome is at it’s core very simple and easy, there’s a lot of finesse that makes starting a bit daunting (at least that was my experience). Only way past that is starting simple and building from there.
There are lots of examples here:
God luck and have fun!
Post your code and the steps you were doing and any errors you were seeing. You will get help.
I use that github link you posted for both a water and gas meter and it works quite well and wasn’t terribly hard to set up.
The harder part was connecting the qmc5883l to the ESP for a long run. I followed the example of using cat6 cable.
Thank you!