Home Assistant and ESPHome How-to

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of the Elektor Labs and Editorial teams, and our best wishes for the new year, here comes another previously unpublished article that's free to download by all registered Elektor e-zine readers.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.

Often the easiest way to get acquainted with new technology such as IoT hardware and software is to apply it in a practical way to build something useful; that way learning gets to be fun. In this project the author builds a remotely controlled model for his grandchildren; they get lots of fun out of using the finished product and also helped him build the boat. It uses some empty drinks bottles, a couple of old PC fans and some small controller boards such as the ESP8266 to handle the control functions, set up a Wi-Fi network and even provide an MQTT broker service!

Sometimes an NTP server on your own local network can come in very handy. As well as situations where your network is cut off from the Internet but various pieces of software need a time reference, there are also cases where you are developing a project that requires the ability to fetch time data over the Internet, but you would ideally like to create custom NTP data. As the following guide shows, achieving all this and more is (relatively) easy.