I’ve been diving into the world of smart home automation lately, and I wanted to share my recent success story. It all started when I got my hands on a Sonoff Dual R3 switch, and I was eager to integrate it into my Home Assistant setup without relying on the eWeLink Cloud. After some research, I decided to try flashing it with ESPHome, but I wasn’t entirely sure if that was the best approach. I also wanted to utilize the built-in power meter feature, which made me wonder if Tasmota might be a better fit. The good news is, after some experimentation, I managed to get everything up and running smoothly!
One of the challenges I faced was configuring my MQTT sensors. I noticed that the entity IDs were being generated in a way that made it hard to distinguish between different devices, especially since I have multiple power meters. I stumbled upon the unique_id option in the MQTT sensor configuration and thought, why not use this to create more descriptive entity IDs? Now, instead of having generic names like sensor.current, I have sensor.esp_hyk_se0111_111b1b_1111_i, which makes it much easier to identify which sensor is which in my setup.
Another exciting project I worked on was setting up an automation to control my hot water pump. I wanted it to run for a specific amount of time and notify me once it was done. Here’s the automation I created:
yaml
- alias: ‘Hot Water’
trigger:
action:- service: switch.turn_on
entity_id: switch.garage_hotwater - delay: seconds: 510
- service: switch.turn_off
entity_id: switch.garage_hotwater - service: notify.ios_all
data:
message: “Hot Water Ready”
title: “Hot Water Ready”
- service: switch.turn_on
It’s been working like a charm! The only thing I noticed is that if the switch.turn_on fails for any reason, it skips the delay and goes straight to turning the switch off and sending the notification. I’m curious if there’s a way to handle such failures more gracefully, but for now, it’s still a solid setup.
I’d love to hear if anyone else has tips on improving automation error handling or has tried similar projects. It’s amazing how much you can achieve with a bit of trial and error, and I’m excited to keep exploring the possibilities of smart home automation!