Got the summary and slides posted for our first dive into the topic of home theater:
For the next meeting on 3/17, we have a few different ideas:
Demonstrate making an example device using an ESP32 board that connects to Home Assistant (something simple like a blinking light or a doorbell)
Hack motorized shades with proprietary comms – replace with an ESP32 board for better HA integration
Dig into whole-home (or at least multi-room wireless) audio solutions
I just found out the Electronics office hours last week did almost exactly that first one. Would @JohnWickham, @aneel, or anyone else want to present and demo something like that at the next Home Tinkering meeting on 3/17? I personally haven’t played with an ESP board yet, but I would like to! Having someone with any actual experience to present that would be a big upgrade over me trying to do it, haha.
If no one has volunteered to show ESPHome with a few devices I can run through it. Adding a temperature/ humidity sensor is easy. Maybe we could make a smart plug with a voltage relay, a smart switch with a button… choose your own adventure.
I was in the lab tonight soldering headers onto some ESP32 dev boards and saw there are ESP8266 dev boards in the lab (Wemos D1 mini and NodeMCU) as well as a bunch of modules.
@Iammikecohen – this sounds awesome! I’d love if you could present that, because I haven’t had time to prepare anything yet (doing a bit too much tinkering at home, haha). ESP8266 or ESP32 would be fine. I was thinking a cool example project would be to make a simple board with a temperature sensor and a fan, and have the fan kick on automatically if the temperature went above some threshold. We could add some hysteresis to make it kick on above a high mark, and and then would stay on until the temp dropped below some lower mark. Or get fancier, and use a 4-pin fan with PWM to control the speed, have a table of temps to fan speed percentages, and monitor the fan’s speed measurement output pin. This seems like the kind of real-world device that anyone putting electronics in a mostly-enclosed cabinet might want to have… I’ve been considering that for a cabinet Val & I are designing for our house right now. But yeah, it would be great to demo building something like that, and also tying it into a Home Assistant instance to show the temperature, fan state, and possibly fan speed. Does that (or any subset of it) seem reasonable to whip up for next week? I can bring the HA Green in we set up in January if you don’t already have one that’s easy to demo with.
I think I have only one Pi that can run HA so if you brought the one you setup that would be great.
Does Asmbly have a router we can login to and view attached devices? That would be helpful to debug but not necessary.
My demo might not be the exact case you laid out but you should leave the meetup knowing how to build such a thing.
I’ll cover: flashing the ESPHome firmware to a development board (or multiple different board that all cost under $5); updating a device’s YAML config and deploying it OTA; viewing logged data in HA; lambda functions; consuming data published from one device on another; and more(?)
I planned to demo with a BMP/BME280 and/or a DHT22 for air temp and humidity; and a 0.96” OLED display for displaying HA sensor values. I could add a voltage relay that turns on a fan if heat or humidity exceeds some value. I think that would cover your basic use case minus the PWM variable speed fan, which I currently don’t know how to do.
You had me at “lambda functions”, haha. This sounds great. Yeah, I’ll bring the HA Green set up to be ready to add things to – it’s very bare-bones right now, which is perfect. I’ll bring a heat gun, so we can easily hit the sensor with some heat to show it working. And the PWM thing can be a different time… That I think would be more fun as an electronics demo, using a power supply, function generator, oscope, and multimeter – then it can connect up to a Pi or ESP board or something that has the right I/O for it. Not sure if Home Tinkering is the right audience for that, but so far it seems like it would be.
Cool, I’ll double-check at home that it’s still working (should be, since that’s where we left off at the January meeting) and then bring it over to Asmbly. Or, what part of town are you in? I am near Airport & Lamar. Could meet you anywhere else if Asmbly’s out of the way for you.
Also, I don’t know how to use the Ubiquiti router to look at the devices on the network, but I have a LAN Scan app on my phone that is basically just as good. That’s what I used to find it on the Asmbly network when I demoed it in January.
OK, I hooked up the Green and it’s running fine. I had to dig back into the January meeting notes to remember what I used for the username and password, haha. I found it and logged in and it works. Since I live down the street from you, and I don’t have any pressing need to go to Asmbly this weekend, want me to drop it off or meet somewhere nearby? I’m free all day tomorrow (Saturday).
Oh awesome, I haven’t been to a proper Fight Opera event yet… I went to PWR a lot before the pandemic, but obvs that’s been ages. I’ll see if Val wants to go. If so, I’ll bring the Green with me and find you there, or if that doesn’t work out then we can meet up Sunday.
