I recently bought a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus from iTead to use it with Home Assistant.
While it worked out of the box, the update itself was not complicated but you
have to find the right tools…
I recently did a proof of concept on shutters automation by hacking the remote
control: the idea is to wire the ESP in parallel with the remote control
buttons.
My remotes are Bubendorff 41677 but it should work with a lot of other remote
controls.
I have a great Rika pellet stove, but despite all the
embedded electronics, it is unable to warn me just before the pellets tank is
empty. As I already have my own low-power wireless devices and home automation
tools, I just added a distance sensor and designed some enclosures.
I am currently working with BLE beacons -only iBeacons for now- with Espressif’s
esp-idf libraries. The aim is to use the ESP32 as a gateway to published
detected beacons to an MQTT broker. It was surprisingly easy and I will write
something about that when the
code will be more polished.
Anyway, by curiosity and to speed up development, I wanted to try
microPython port to ESP32, and I did. Unfortunately, BLE support is not yet
reliable enough and a lot of advertisements were lost with 4 to 6 beacons. This
post is to keep track of my work and, hopefully, use in the future when
microPython port will be more reliable :-)
Introduction I have been experimenting with solar panels, Home Assistant and my electricity meter lately. This French meter from the utility is called Linky. It provides a small power supply (130 mW) and a serial link hidden via amplitude modulation.
To avoid using batteries, I built a prototype that harvests this power, demodulates the serial link, and feeds the data into an nRF52 development kit. It works well enough that I never bothered turning this messy setup into a proper PCB.
