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Home Assistant Swiss army knife

May 18th, 2019

Why…

Home automation is adictive…once you have your first device installed, it’s a slipery slope. You will start integrating everything, and since there is so much diversity of devices in your house, you will need a bunch of sensors and actuators. This is a standard box that I am placing on every room of the house to have a baseline of capabilities:

Pre-requisites

You have an instance of Home Assistance with ESPHome ready. There is plenty of tutorial about this on the internet.

Hardware

list of components used

I put it together like this:

garage_toolbox_1

And fit it into a plastic container

garage_toolbox_2 garage_toolbox_3

Software

microcontrolled side

  • create a new ESPHome device, I called this one garage_toolbox.
  • Edit the esphome garage_toolbox.yaml file so it looks like this:
substitutions:
  upper_devicename: Garage Toolbox

esphome:
  name: garage_toolbox
  platform: ESP8266
  board: d1_mini

wifi:
  ssid: "REPLACE_ME"
  password: "REPLACE_ME"
  domain: ".your_local_domain"
  fast_connect: true

# sync the time from Home Assistant  
time:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: homeassistant_time

# Enable logging
logger:

web_server:
  port: 80

# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
  password: "REPLACE_ME"

ota:
  password: "REPLACE_ME"

# show status using the built in LED
status_led:
  pin:
    number: GPIO2
    inverted: True

# https://esphome.io/components/i2c.html#i2c
# you need to enable i2c before using any devices
i2c:
  sda: 14 # D5
  scl: 12 # D6
  scan: True

sensor:
  - platform: wifi_signal
    name: "${upper_devicename} WiFi signal"
    update_interval: 60s
    accuracy_decimals: 0

  - platform: uptime
    name: "${upper_devicename} uptime"
    accuracy_decimals: 0
    
  # https://esphome.io/components/sensor/tsl2561.html
  - platform: tsl2561
    name: "${upper_devicename} Ambient Light"
    address: 0x39
    update_interval: 60s
    accuracy_decimals: 0
  
  # https://esphome.io/components/sensor/dht.html
  - platform: dht
    pin: D7
    model: AM2302
    temperature:
      name: "${upper_devicename} Temperature"
      accuracy_decimals: 0
    humidity:
      name: "${upper_devicename} Humidity"
      accuracy_decimals: 0
    update_interval: 60s
    
binary_sensor:
  # rcwl-0516
  - platform: gpio
    pin: D1
    name: "${upper_devicename} Motion sensor"
    device_class: motion
  • Compile, download the binary and flash ESPHome (again, there is plenty of tutorials about this out there)

After flashing the ESPhome image the micontroller will restart and connect to the wifi.

home assistant configuration

  • the autodiscovery should take care of finding the new ESPHome device, go to Integrations and you should be able to add it from there.