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Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

Yeah ESPHome is magic. I set up a full home humidity monitoring setup for the cost of a soldering setup + approximately $0 on components. No subscription bullshit, no proprietary interface bullshit, just exactly the setup I want and it was fun and easy to build!

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Bit of a late reply but check out sensor HLK-LD2402 if you haven't.

Think presence detection except the range actually works. Reliable and fast between 30cm and couple meters

ESPHome is really cool, but it's still missing power management last I checked, which is the main reason I don't use it these days.

I'm not sure why enabling automatic light sleep isn't like, priority #1 for Arduino, but I guess there's some subtle issues where it might break certain sketches or something.

Because realistically none of the hardware used even supports deep sleep correctly and will drain the battery using their high quiescent current LDO regs, pull-ups, LEDs and vBat dividers. Also latency and energy cost of getting back on the network, waiting for hass server to connect (in esphome protocol devices are servers, not clients) and going back to sleep is only going to work for some weird edge scenarios where you don't care about latency or polling rate.

Automatic light sleep maintains a WiFi connection with only 1 or 2 milliamps, I'm using the exact same ESP as server model but with Websockets, and it all just works.

There's even some PRs for automatic light sleep I think in ESPHome, but they're not merged yet.

Same. I had a couple extra ESP boards from an order where I only needed one, an extra breadboard and humidity/temp sensor and decided to finally measure the temp out in the greenhouse. It's amazing to have all that in a grafana dash running on a r pi.

Do you (or anyone!) know a good tutorial / series / blog how to get started with home automation?

I'd say install home assistant, and get a device that runs ESPhome, so you can tweak it. Unfortunately I don't really have anything more specific than that, but I agree that ESPhome is great. You solder some stuff, define the pins in the config, and everything works.

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