ESP8266/ESP-01 WiFi boards and home automation.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Has anyone played with these? It looks like they can be connected to arduino's to extend them, but can also be used to do basic tasks (send a http request at the push of a button or drive a relay to switch stuff) standalone.

I'm thinking of buying some to have a play with. Both with something like homeassistant software, but also something I've been thinking of myself which I was going to make with dash buttons.

They seem to go for about a quid on Alixpress, but are also buried in a lot of smart plugs. This means they could be reflashed to not use some shitty cloud service and connect to things like homeassistant or your own code directly.

[MojoJojo]

I've did a couple of things a few years ago. I used one of 8266 controlled relays on one of the lights in the living room. It worked with a little Web page. However, the led ring it was on burnt out recently and I took the relay out since I think it was a bit dodgy electrically and was probably what caused the led to burn out. (that's not down to the relay directly, on phone so can't explain well)

The other project was an esp32 connected to an epaper display that showed my Google shopping list. This worked for a couple of weeks but stopped working before I mounted it all properly and worked out the power solution properly. I should really resurrect that project.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Cool, I've ordered 4 modules, a relay module and some powerbank enclosures that can take 1 or two 18650 cells and some ams1117 regulators.

The idea being I can put a button or multiple buttons and the module in the housing where the second cell can go (the enclosure charges the cells in parallel) to make some IOT buttons that make http requests to either an IOT service or my own api's and can play with the relay for controlling some lighting or my chromecast audio's.

Although the module doesn't expose much in the way of GPIO pins, I think I can use a resistor network to pull down the voltage on the ADC line and trigger a transistor on the signal line to figure out which button was pressed.

My main goals are - turning on lights automatically after sundown if my phone is present on the wifi.
Push button streaming of internet radio with my chromecast(s), change station and possibly sync (if chromecast A is streaming a station and I push a button, the second chromecast joins the 'group' and streams it also to enable multi-room audio).

[Dex Sawash]

I really like the idea of all the effort to build these things for very mundane tasks. I assume you are just perfecting methods until you feel safe building something you can stick your knob in.