Esphome on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Reverse Engineering the EasyStart Bluetooth Protocol

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I decoded the Bluetooth protocol of my Micro-Air EasyStart soft starters from the vendor’s Android app, with help from Claude Code, and now read their compressor data into Home Assistant through ESPHome.

Trying to Keep my Garage Cool

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:11:19 +0000

We live in a moderate climate, and when we built our house my plans were for my home server rack to be installed in the garage and vented through the outside wall to the alley. Unfortunately plans changed, and the instant hot gas water heater had to be moved blocking rack access to outside ventilation. Without cool outside air the servers complain about overheating in the peak of summer, and I either need to power down or keep the garage door open during the day.

ESP32 Water and Gas Utility Meter

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 03:27:27 +0000

The recent release of Home Assistant’s energy dashboard inspired me to restore my gas and water utility meter monitors. I lost the measurements when I removed my Brultech GreenEye energy meters in favor of Sense energy monitors.

To recap, my local city and utilities do not allow any connections in any form to their utility meters, but I am allowed to install my own meters downstream, as long as the meter models are approved for local use, i.e. the exact same model as used by the local utilities. I installed the same model water and gas meters as used by the utilities but with dry-contact metering.

Using ESP to Debug an ESP

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 18:04:53 +0000

This post is about troubleshooting the sporadic ESP8266 hardware watchdog resets in my water recirculation pump controller project.

The ESP8266 would randomly restart, which I can observe by monitoring the uptime reported by ESPHome to Home Assistant.

It is difficult to debug because the Sonoff TH10 is in a waterproof case in my garage, making it difficult to get a USB/UART connection for debug logging. The alternative is to monitor logs over the network, and to include the debug component that will log the restart reason. But, network logging does not capture crash information, that is only logged by UART.

Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:51:47 +0000

Our house uses a Noritz natural gas instant hot water heater, with a dedicated hot water recirculation line. Problem is the heater is installed in the garage, and in the summer the garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water in the recirculation line, and we have to wait several minutes for hot water, defeating the entire purpose of the instant hot recirculation line.

Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:16:57 +0000

This is a summary of my experience, and the exact steps I followed, to convert cheap Tuya based WiFi smart plugs to ESPHome for Home Assistant integration.

I am a novice when it comes to ESPHome, and I pieced information together from various great sources:

My goal was to use Tuya Convert, for it allows over the air firmware conversion, and no physical disassembly and firmware programmer wiring is required. Unfortunately I found that many currently shipping versions of plugs that apparently used to work no longer work, possibly contributed to by Tuya switching from ESP82xx to Realtek chips. The model numbers and physical appearance of the plugs did not change, making it difficult to predict what you will get if you buy now.