insteon-terminal VS esphome

(5) If you want to create new timers, create a schedule within the confines of Home Assistant (or openHAB) -- don't do it through the Insteon Hub. I do not believe there is a known way outside the (now non-working) official Insteon apps of editing the schedules that turn scenes on/off at certain intervals. However, you can use things like insteon-terminal to remove devices from the scene being controlled by the schedule. So the schedule continues to run on your hub, but it just doesn't turn anything on/off anymore. There's discussion here.

From github.

4- Download the insteon terminal from github: https://github.com/pfrommerd/insteon-terminal

Insteon (the company and all its internet servers) have gone belly up, and your insteon hub will no longer work with the Insteon App. As a matter of fact, both the hub and the smart phone app (on iPhone and Android) will not be able to login to the backend/cloud server! I was deeply saddened by the news, as I have 53 insteon devices in my smart home, and being able to control these devices is important to me. It appears that Nokia has purchased Smartlabs and/or its patents (Smartlabs is the company that owned Insteon patents). The hope is that Nokia will respect the existing insteon devices owners, and provide comparable or better support in the future. I can't wait for that hope to materialize, if ever! For those of you who are able and willing to do some technical work, here is a solution I experimented with a few days ago, and it works perfectly well. I have tested it on iPhone and other Apple devices. 1- Find the IP address that your powered up hub is using. One way to find the IP is to query your router. This is router specific, so I will leave it to you to find out how, depending on your router. You need to change the router/gateway, such that the DHCP IP address given to your hub is reserved, and will not change upon subsequent reboots/power ups. 2- Find out the user and password printed on the back of your insteon hub (not the ones you used to login on the insteon app) 3- If you have a few insteon devices, and you are willing to remove the faceplate on switches, etc. to find out the insteon IDs, you do not need insteon-terminal, and you can skip to step 5 below 4- Download the insteon terminal from github: https://github.com/pfrommerd/insteon-terminal 5- Use the hub user, password and IP address with the insteon-terminal. Issue the command modem.getdb() then modem.printdb(). These commands will dump all the insteon device IDs on the screen. I needed this because I have 53 insteon devices, and I was not willing to remove plates on all of them to get the device IDs. 5- Get yourself a Raspberry PI, the one I experimented with is Pi 4: https://www.raspberrypi.com/ I usually get PI boards from: https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-4b-budget-kit/ 6- Install homebridge on the PI board, see this for instructions: https://github.com/homebridge/homebridge/wiki/Install-Homebridge-on-Raspbian 7- After you configure homebridge, repeat the procedure you used to make sure the DHCP address given to your new PI board is reserved on your router’s DHCP configuration. This will ensure that the local DHCP IP address assigned to your new PI board will persist across reboots. 8- Install the insteon plugin: https://www.npmjs.com/package/homebridge-platform-insteonlocal. I have tested this plugin, and it works well on all switches, dimmers, outlets, etc. even with insteon IO/Link modules. 9- Add the HomeKit accessories as per instruction on: https://github.com/homebridge/homebridge/wiki/Install-Homebridge-on-Raspbian#configuration-reference. I hope you will like the new ability to use your HomeKit (Home on iPhone and other Apple devices) with insteon devices. Homebridge is a wonderful solution if you have an Apple ecosystem. I used it for other non-HomeKit compliant devices, such as motorized shades, garage door motors, etc. There are many homebridge plugins for older devices that are not HomeKit compliant.

I think insteon-terminal can change the link db, so you can leave the schedule running on some scene, but remove your devices from the scene. I have not tried this yet (because I'm mostly curious how it will continue to work). Note when setting up insteon-terminal, you have to copy their init.py and configure it with your hubs info in connectToMyHub(), but it also makes sense to look up the insteon address of your hub and add

Its not user friendly, but I've success with this insteon terminal: https://github.com/pfrommerd/insteon-terminal

For the ESP32, an hero is in the process of adding LVGL to ESPHome. You can try it out now: https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pull/6363

Here's the (very good!) preview documentation: https://deploy-preview-3678--esphome.netlify.app/components/...

This is such a game-changer for me that I'll be using the ESP32 over the ESP8266 for any projects involving displays from now on.

Solid state relay is probably a bad idea with all the extra heat-sinking, extra cost, and chance of getting counterfeits.

I do this with ESPHome & a J115F21C12VDCS.9 relay (note only the NO side is rated for 40A resistive): https://i.imgur.com/MqqOkoY.png

Choose any of the temperature sensors here for air temperature sensing: https://esphome.io/

Configuration is so easy. For the sensor, just copy the config from here, for example: https://esphome.io/components/sensor/bme280. Add a gpio output (https://esphome.io/components/output/gpio) and a bang-bang climate controller (https://esphome.io/components/climate/bang_bang.html)

You might want to take a look at https://esphome.io/ for an easy integration of an ESP32/8266 into home Assistant.

You can do this with a $30 Sonoff S31 running ESPHome [0]. Since the Sonoff wall switch can run a ping sensor against your server you could create a watchdog automation right on the S31 to shut off the mains power to the S31 switch and turn back on after X seconds.

There are other ways you could have the S31 do operational checks but ultimately ESPHome is probably an interesting consideration and supported by tons of off the shelf hardware.

[0] https://esphome.io/

They're pretty great and compatible with most things. ESPHome [1] is a great resource for getting ESP32's working nicely with HA and you can find lots of projects using it to learn from.

You'll likely need to do soldering if you want to connect sensors, batteries and the like.

Personally I really like what SEEED Studio [2] does with their ESP32 boards and they have nice docs.

1. https://esphome.io/

Maybe you could set up ESPHome on the ESP32. It might make connecting those components easier, plus a decent web server built in. Then your app can be set up to access data provided by the ESPHome web server.

# # Setting pins for sda and scl will be required until https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pull/2970 is released

Probably an unpopular opinion, but for the simple stuff you may just want to use something like EspHome where you just need to create a yaml file. Once you’re comfortable with that maybe get into something a bit more advanced, but esphome make it a breeze. It integrates with home assistant if you already have that in place as well.

ESPHome