Home Automation Made Easy with ESPHome and Home Assistant

Fabulous open source projects like ESPurna, ESPHome and Home Assistant make home automation much easier. Instead of spending many hours on developing communication protocols and other low-level stuff, you can concentrate on defining automation rules for your connected devices. What makes these projects even better is their support for many commercially available products. Seamlessly integrate your own ESP-based devices with e.g. Ikea Trådfri, Philips Hue and Zigbee-based lamps and switches.

Sensors are a worthwhile topic to write about: They bring electronics projects in contact with the real world and facilitate all kinds of practical applications. Dogan Ibrahim describes more than 40 projects in this comprehensive book.

A tutorial about using ESPHome to configure and connect an ESP-8266-based device to Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi.

With the compliments of the Elektor Labs and Editorial teams, and our best wishes for the new year, here comes another previously unpublished article that's free to download by all registered Elektor e-zine readers. "Free Fresh Articles" are published at two-weekly intervals in the Elektor e-zine, alternating with "Free Back Articles". This time we have a Graphic User Interface (GUI) with touch control that’s remarkable for two things: First, it’s one and the same piece of hardware running happily on at least three popular microcontroller platforms: ESP32, ESP8266, and Raspberry Pi. Second, it employs elements from the LittlevGL library which comes with an MIT licence and produces code for many 16-, 32- and 64-bit microcontrollers.

Many projects with a microcontroller inside have to display something. In the past, 2-line text displays were common and sufficient, but today graphic LCDs (or OLED displays) are increasingly used. There are several libraries for displaying attractive graphics as well as for touch operation. LittlevGL is a library under the liberal MIT license, which can be easily adapted to various displays and controllers. In this article, we demonstrate the whole thing using an ESP32 board and a touch LCD that displays data from a weather station.

Many people care about the environment they live in. It's not about the speed of your Internet connection or other mundane problems, but about particulate matter and radioactive elements floating in the air. This Environmental Monitoring System allows you to keep an eye on what is going on around you.

In this video we review the Elektor ESP32 Smart Kit Bundle consisting of the Elektor book "The Complete ESP32 Projects Guide" and the "ESP32 Smart Kit" component box. We learn how to set up the Arduino IDE for the ESP32-DevKitC, and try a few examples with it. In the end we switch to MicroPython and make an LED flash.

Forward your doorbell to your smartphone or computer.

When the nodes that make up a distributed system need to share a precise timebase, a time-server may be used. In this project the time-server is the atomic clock of a GPS satellite. GPS receivers provide the time to every node, and each node synchronizes its internal millisecond clock to this time.

When Espressif introduced the ESP32 it became an instant hit in the maker world. The new ESP-EYE board is their latest development board for image recognition and audio processing in AIoT applications.