Very recently I purchased the Micro-Air EasyStart Flex and via ESPHome, got it connected to Home Assistant. What is the Micro-Air EasyStart Flex? It is an advanced and versatile soft starter, designed for all sizes of residential A/C units up to 6 tons (72,000 BTUs). The EasyStart provides a controlled...
Hot off the press is the brand new Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C5. This is the first Seeed Studio Xiao module with 5 GHz Wi-Fi support. Built on the RISC-V architecture, it brings together 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE), and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee, Thread) connectivity,...
I've recently gone down the ESPHome rabbit hole with Home Assistant. My primary uses cases are Bluetooth proxies and capturing Bluetooth IRKs for room-level presence detection. In this post I cover three popular Seeed Studio ESP32 devices: C3, C6 and S3. I've created Github repos for each model to simplify...
This post covers my vibe coding experience to create an open source ESPHome Bluetooth IRK (Identity Resolving Key) capture tool. Many modern smart devices—including iPhones and Apple Watches—use Bluetooth Resolvable Private Addresses (RPA) to protect your privacy. Instead of broadcasting a fixed Bluetooth address that could be used to track you,...
Unlike general presence detection, room-based location detection with Bluetooth can tell you who, or what, is in each room. This is great for highly customized automations with Home Assistant, that could, for example, set room lighting or the temperature based on who is in the room not just the mere...