Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

I have a project at home that uses a bunch of thermocouples, power controllers, current sensors, etc. I was trying to run them all off a raspberry pi running node red. It started off OK but quickly ran into trouble after the hardware started scaling up (particularly the thermocouples)

I had an esp8266 sitting around, so I flashed it with tasmota, configured it to run four thermocouples, and then tied it back to the raspberry pi via MQTT message bus. It's absolutely fantastic. I put a second one together to run a small portable load cell setup for measuring output rate of the process and pipe all of those measurements through MQTT as well. Plan is to create a flash/configure pipeline so i can swap out the ESP boards and/or easily tack more on over time. Ultimately would like to get all of the hardware off of the PI and have spare ESP8266 boards around so i have a bit of redundancy.

Tons of capability for the money and the process of getting Tasmota up and running with a standard sensor couldn't have been easier. Lots of fun!!!

It might be worth looking at ESPHome (https://esphome.io/), it's very similar to Tasmota but modular and is configured via yaml files. It also supports OTA updates for firmware/config changes (after the initial flash). I feel ESPHome scales better than Tasmota for these reasons - no need to visit the individual web UI's for each Tasmota device, using ESPHome you can update your configs from a central web UI and then push the changes to your devices via wifi.

TLDR; Tasmota is great for bespoke devices, but IMO ESPHome is better because it's modular and supports OTA updates.

If you want a comprehensive comparison between ESPhome and Tasmota, The Guy With The Swiss Accent[0] got you covered.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaFM0tKOvY

THIS is such a great video! I had just flashed some wifi lightbulbs with Tasmota and was going to go with ESPHome but the lazyman in me just left it along. If I had watched this video first, I would have followed through. Now everything is setup and working I am not going to go through and change it all again.

Second the recommendation for esphome, especially if you are trying to do something a little smarter than just a remotely controlled switch. I started with tasmota for my little wastewater pump controller but I found it hard to get my simple if-this-then-that logic to work in tasmota. ESP home on the other hand allows you to write you own C/++ code if you want.

I didn’t know you could write your own code with ESPHome, I’ll have to dig deeper.

When I hit a limit I went to Arduino and then hooked that into Home Assistant via and MQTT broker - Mosquitto.

Well check this out, thank you! I was going to before but Tasmota was so dead simple and i had all the logic offboard anyway. But I like some of the points you mentioned that would help with automation of building out new ones. Thanks!

BTW I can’t say enough good stuff about node-red for automation. It has been great. I tie it into into influxdb for telemetry and it has a nice little dashboard feature for process monitoring. All with almost zero code.

Node-red is indeed great, and useful even for novice users that can't code, while still being powerful for power users that want to write JS.

I run Home Assistant (on their Hassio OS) on a raspberry pi2, which includes integration for Tasmota, ESPHome, Node-red, MQTT server, influxdb, plex server, presence detection, and more, all through a polished web ui. I highly recommend it if you're looking to tie together a bunch of IoT devices. For me it has become my central location to manage all my "smart" home devices, and is essentially the glue that holds it all together while providing a pleasant UX for managing it all. With the integration of Node-red, it provides nodes that represent your Home Assistant based sensors/switches so you can easily read/write their values within your Node-red flow.

The lambda functions for actions in ESPHome allowed me to very simply - basically fiddling with a YAML file - send sensor data directly to the domoticz API. Plus ESPHome can send _any_ 433MHz command, unlike Tasmota, which is very limited - binary on/off - in that sense.

ESPHome is great! I haven't done much stuff with it aside a few PIR motion/temp/humidity sensors for the house.

https://www.malachisoord.com/2019/12/05/esphome-based-pir-mo...

Tasmota I use just like said for switches and for that it works very well too.

ESP are great, and it's amazing how cheap they are.

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