As much as I love the ESPHome project, there are some features that seem like they’d be essential in an embedded/IoT firmware sdk yet their implementation remain left as an exercise to the user. This post is about one of those “Wait, that’s not built in?! How old is this project?” features: timers.

ESPHome, Timers and You

To be clear, ESPHome does have all of the primitives needed to build basic timers. You can get basic non-blocking pauses in automations with the delay: action.

What

Hidrate Spark bottles are one of a small but growing number of ‘smart’ water bottles. In this instance, ‘smart’ refers to some mechanism for reporting on and tracking the bottles content over time.

Tasmota reliability

A few months ago, I started to notice some bizarre behavior with the DS03 ceiling fan controllers that I had previously flashed with Tasmota. Very regularly, the devices would crash and reboot! I almost never noticed unless I was explicitly looking at the uptime / boot count graphs for the devices but every once in a while, the device would reboot right as I was trying to control it remotely.

A friend recently asked for my help with some reverse engineering. They wanted to know how difficult it would be to re-use some components from a lot of refurbished blood pressure cuffs they had recently acquired.

Sounds easy, right? At a high level, there’s going to be:

• a pump and a pressure sensor and a valve
• a micro controller to run the show
• a way to communicate the readings back to the user

In the interest of expediting things, I asked for the FCC IDs from the devices so I could have a look inside… and was surprized to find out that there was no FCC listing for this particular model from the lot.

This is a super quick “because the official docs didn’t make it super clear so here’s what ended up working for me” post.

After some very disappointing WiFi connectivity issues, I settled on a Zwave based thermostat to replace the Venstar thermostat.

After installing the Honeywell TH6320 and connecting it to the ZwaveJS gateway, a new `climate`` entity appeared in Home Assistant. From there, I was able to see/control: