Henrik Carlsson's Blog

With inspiration from the excellent The Stock Pot, and in particular the full tutorial for how to Make Your Own Universal Remote (ESPHome + Home Assistant), I’m slowly starting to wrap my head around Home Assistant and ESP8266/ESP32. I’ve managed to wire up a button to my ESP8266 and I can register single, double, or long presses on said button in Home Assistant.

There is a lot more work to be done in Home Assistant itself before I can get anything proper out of this, but I’m making progress and having fun.

I’ve recently gotten myself a Home Assistant Green. Up until now I haven’t used it for anything in particular. My smart home consists almost exclusively of IKEA stuff at the moment and as long as I keep it that way the Ikea’s own app works fine. I would like to be able to add stuff from other manufacturers though, so that is why I got the Home Assistant and will slowly migrate over to using it instead.

Right now I’m reading up on some ESP32/ESP8266. I would like to make my own simple home automation hardware and this seems like the way to go. I bought a cheap ESP8266 board the other day and I think I’ve managed to install ESPHome on it. It shows up in my network logs so it seems to be connecting to wifi. I’m considering this a successful first test and I’ll keep playing with this more in the future.