A little question for the HA and DIY crossroad. Has anyone here made your own sensors/devices with arduino, pi or some other microcontroller/sbc to interact with HA? I have some spare parts around and I’m thinking in something simple, like an air quality, maybe a little weather station or something to tell me if the garage door is opened or close, something simple, yet usable. I had a look on instructables, but I wished for something that would integrate with my first HA experience. Any thoughts?
Edit: thanks everyone for the replies. If you could share how-tos to this projects or anything it would be awesome. You are a great community indeed! :)
I have lots of temp/humidity sensors. I use them to control heating zones instead of the traditional thermostats.
I’ve become a big fan of the Adafruit BME680, but it’s pricey compared to other sensors. But, you get temp, humidity, pressure, etc. Very accurate, too.
The sensors are connected to D1 Mini boards. The dry contact switches I use are in a 4 switch device from Sonoff (4CH Pro, I think).
I prefer Tasmota to ESP Home, but it’s personal preference.
You could easily control your own contactors instead of using a Sonoff device if you want.
ESPHome is what you’re looking for. Makes it very easy to integrate ESP32 and similar devices.
I had some micropython boards using mqtt to talk to HA, great for sensors, but have switched most to Esphome, it integrates easier into HA.
I’ve got a wall switch on the coffee grinder that switches off after a min, because otherwise it’s power supply humms.
I’ve got a epaper display on the fridge, battery powered that tells me what type of recycling goes out this week (uses deep sleep mode on esp to wake up every 18hrs, pull info from HA calendar to display, report it’s battery state, so we can get a mobile alert to charge it every couple of months)
A esp8266 board that’s got 6 relays, hooked up to dampers on the central air conditioning, turns on or off airflow to different rooms.
Power monitoring for the washing machine to send a voice message when the washing machine is done, using Athom Tech plugs that come with Esphome pre installed
Another athom tech plug on our electric blankets, nothing like having them automatically come on and never having to worry about leaving them on (will turn off after 3hrs after they automatically or are manually turned on)
Several accent lights using Esphome powered rgb light strips, could also use wled, but Esphome is good for this too
Esphome is amazing with home assistant!. Build a climate control with it for my server room for example. Pure esphome sensors and relays on a single board.
Ya, as others have said… esp32 (or esphome)
I have a 4 temp sensor (two DS18B20) that are attached to my in/out water lines to my geothermal water loop, and 2 (DHT22) in the air stream showing/logging IN/OUT air temp.
Don’t mind my terrible ms paint drawing :)
I’ve made a few, but they were quite specific in their purpose. The esp32 ecosystem is pretty great for this purpose, but generally I find people won’t take the time to fuss around with making their own anything when off the shelf varieties are cheap.
With Esphome I made a gate opener (soldered a wireless remote to a relay module and the module to an esp32), a thermostat (screen, encoder wheel, dht-22, etc), a pc power button remote… and like 8 other projects that I never finished!
I made my own smart outlets with an ESP-01, dual relay board, and ESPHome. Also made some temp/humidity sensors as well as a 20x4 text display. All powered by a bunch of ESP-01s I bought cheap and in-bulk from Ali and programming using ESPHome which handles most of the work interfacing with the components as well as the HomeAssistant integration.
