This is an instance where I think the folks at nobu casa (paid branch of home assistant development) could dedicate some resources to hardware. Instead of the prebuilt SBC stuff like HA-blue, or yellow or whatever. Create an esp device that just has a reliable microphone, and crank them out. I’d buy one for every room in my house!

I’ve got an esp army in my greenhouse that runs wLED, and one of them has a mic for doing the sound reactive display stuff, but it’s running wLED, not ESPHome… I wonder how easy it would be to just slap a digital mic on some of the other esp things I’ve got floating around?

I’ll just add that I’m a fan of valetudo, but it can be a bit more involved than your standard firmware swap. I had to build a pin breakout board, and race against time to root my vacuum because there is an auto-reset programmed into some robots that can brick your vacuum if the jailbreak isn’t finished when the reboot is triggered.

Just read the process through all the way before you decide on device.

I was sweating like I was in the hurt locker when I did mine, because my partner would have NEVER let me forget the time I bought a $900 robot vacuum and broke it before it even cleaned the floor once!

Ah, that’s what I was looking for. Thank you. I am not sure if an MQTT signal works well for dimming, but I guess I’ll give it a try, because otherwise I end up with two switches controlling the same set of lights in the same location… not idea.

Thanks!

In my experience, aqara motion/lux sensors are pretty binary. I have one in my greenhouse to help with my lighting, but the lux value goes from 0 to max when ANY amount of light hits it.

There is no way I can tell the difference between cloudy and sunny. I can’t tell the difference between 6am (sun just over the horizon, but still behind trees) and 12 noon.

I would love to be able to detect when the sun goes behind a tree and shades my garden, but that’s just not possible with the granularity of the data I’m getting.

Wow, that looks perfect. I wonder how strong the zigbee signal is in my back yard…

Also, did you try those moisture sensors? That might be the next step for my system.

Yeah, that’s the easy part. But what valve? How to power the valve plus the esp board? Waterproofing? Those are the tricky parts.

Ah, interesting. I might snag one to tinker with. I’m getting lazy in my ways, so generally things I have to take apart to flash get lower priority, but my greenhouse and garden are my favorite places to tinker.

Edit: I’m still figuring out how lemmy works. In one app it showed my reply was posted to another topic I was browsing at the time. So I deleted it, and tried to repost in this reply. But once it was removed, I couldn’t edit it. So I ended up replying to my own removed reply…

Ah, interesting. I might snag one to tinker with. I’m getting lazy in my ways, so generally things I have to take apart to flash get lower priority, but my greenhouse and garden are my favorite places to tinker.

Love me some Tasmota.

What are the connections on that thing though? It doesn’t look like standard garden hose thread?

Looks perfect, but I don’t see any shipping to the states. Not to mention, international shipping is gonna bump that cost up significantly!

I think this is the end game. But for now, I’m looking to get more dialed in control on just the simple on/off.

I got my garden rigged up with the different rate emitters based on what is in the different beds. So it’s configured to handle a single zone, but in the future I would love to have it broken down into more granular control.

I see that now. I don’t even read links these days, just click them. I thought that was just one long link!

Sweet. I think I’ll check it out.

I’ve seen those as well, but it didn’t seem to have an integration in home assistant. Now do you add the devices? Do you have to sniff the wifi traffic and intercept them with mqtt or something?