I’m about to make a huge step up on my home automation game. I recently found that many of the home automation devices that we get use an ESP chip or even a ESP compatible chip, the later means that I can desolder the microcontroller and solder an ESP on it’s place.
And I recently found that some old LED wifi + IR controllers that I have lying around already have an ESP soldered to it.
Why ESP?
ESPs are largely supported by Tasmota firmware for many different applications ( IR controllers, Blind motors controllers, LED controllers ) and
The actual project
What I have in mind is to get a cheap universal IR remote to control the house. All I need is:
- Home Assistant ( which I already have on my NAS )
- IR Remote
- ESP board
- IR Receiver to mount on the ESP board
I was mindblown when I thought that my spare LED controllers might already have an ESP board to it, and when I opened one I was welcomed by an ESP8285 which already has WiFi and , by the nature of this beast, an IR receiver soldered to it.
I can then just ignore the RGB pins to control the LED strip and use the board to flash Tasmota to it.
The diagram is pretty simple, having the ESP doing HTTP requests ( or MQTT broadcasts ) is no big deal with Tasmota, and mapping buttons on the Remote to the messasges that will be sent to HomeAssistant is not hard at all for someone with slight coding skills ( I’m talking about JSON ), here’s how it looks on paper:
Now I just have to actually prototype with a ESP8266 to get the coding portion solved before I move on to stripping all my MagicHome LED controllers apart.
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