Node RED VS esphome

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).

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