Using ESPHome with the Treatlife DS03

2022-06-09 514 words 3 minutes

Contents

Post depreciation notice

This is an update to the Fixing Home Assistant discovery with Tasmota on the Treatlife DS03 post.

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.

I was able to confirm that the rules I was using to ‘augment’ the Home Assistant auto-discovery payload were the culprit. Odd since nothing had changed; only the version of tasmota has been changing.

While it’s not clear what the issue is, it probably has something to do with RAM exhaustion. The details are in Tasmota issue #15636 if your curious.

The Tasmota rules were a workaround to a broader problem: tasmota offers very little to customize how the entity is advertised to Home Assistant. Since the workaround was no longer working, the next logical step is to re-evaluate if Tasmota is the appropriate firmware for the device.

Using ESPHome with the DS03

Beta software release

I strongly prefer MQTT for my Home Automation interoperability.

The MQTT <-> Home Assistant mechanism in ESPHome has been playing second fiddle to the native ESPHome <-> Home Assistant API as of late so there are more bugs and usability issues. As such, the YAML below depends on a fix for mqtt.fan component that exists in the 2022.06.b2 or later release.

Specifically, this commit.

If you do not use MQTT for your ESPHome <-> Home Assistant linking, you should be fine using the latest ‘stable’ release of ESPHome.

After migrating the tasmota install to ESPHome, I am happy to report that ESPHome is running on the DS03 and that the full/proper MQTT auto-discovery payload is published. 🥳

Here is a ‘reference’ YAML file that is similar to the ones I use in ‘production’. You will need to add your own MQTT/WiFi… etc configuration.

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substitutions:
  hostname: YourHostNameHere
  friendly_name: YourDeviceNameHere

esphome:
  name: ${hostname}
  platform: ESP8266
  board: esp01_1m

# Enable logging
logger:
  level: INFO

# Uses a TuYa MCU to drive the power components
# See: https://esphome.io/components/tuya.html
##
tuya:

# See: https://esphome.io/components/uart.html
uart:
  rx_pin: GPIO3
  tx_pin: GPIO1
  # Not sure why/where/how this error shows up but seems functional as is /shrug
  # [E][uart:015]:   Invalid baud_rate: Integration requested baud_rate 9600 but you have 115200!
  baud_rate: 115200

# See: https://esphome.io/components/light/tuya.html
light:
  - name: ${friendly_name} Light
    id: device_light
    platform: "tuya"
    dimmer_datapoint: 10
    switch_datapoint: 9
    min_value: 100
    max_value: 1000
    icon: "mdi:ceiling-fan-light"
    restore_mode: ALWAYS_OFF

# See: https://esphome.io/components/fan/tuya.html
fan:
  - name: ${friendly_name} Speed
    id: device_fan
    platform: "tuya"
    switch_datapoint: 1
    speed_datapoint: 3
    speed_count: 4
    icon: "mdi:ceiling-fan"
    restore_mode: ALWAYS_OFF