Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266, 3D Printing, and other Technology
About 8 months ago I purchased a Creality Ender 5. I wrote a mini getting started guide about it. In that guide, I mentioned OctoPrint, and how I would do a separate write-up on that. I installed OctoPrint after a few prints. I wanted to be able to monitor the prints remotely since the printer is down in the basement. This write-up goes through my setup and settings along with the plugins I used.
I was recently messing around with my Infrared Thermometer to make sure the air coming out of the heating vents was the right temperature. While doing that, I of course had to point it at random things throughout the house, when I finally got to the 3D printer, which was currently running. I figured that would be a good way to verify that the reading on the sensors was close to the IR thermometer. And it was close enough. The glass bed was reading a few degrees cooler, but I figured that was to be expected since the printer sensor is not on top of the glass where I was taking my reading.
As I talked about in my last post about the FilaWeigher, I wanted to add MQTT and temperature/humidity(Using the BME280) to that project. Well, I've done that. Refer to the previous post for more details. But now for this one, I'm just going to focus on the updated code and schematics, and the Home Assistant integration via MQTT. I'm going to leave the old post up for the people that don't want MQTT or the BME280 sensor. This version also has JSON output of all the sensors which allows for OctoPrint integration(I actually just finished up that plugin and I'm going to be posting that up soon).
I created this project so I can know exactly how much filament is left on a spool for my 3D printer, an Ender 5 I wrote about previously. However, it can very well be used to weigh anything else. I put a few settings that are specific to the filament, but they don't have to be used.
UPDATE: I have written an updated post(1 year later) about this printer. Be sure to read that one after this one as there is some update info in there. Here is the link to it.
About 2 months ago, I decided to finally pull the trigger on purchasing a 3D printer. I settled on the Creality Ender 5. I felt that it struck the right balance between bed size, price, and the community behind it. Although the community isn’t extremely large on its own, I felt that it’s similar enough to the Ender 3 that I should be able to able to figure out any issues by using the same types of advice. I have found that to be accurate for the most part. In addition, it looks like the number of Ender 5 users have increased sharply around the time I bought it. I also liked how it had the 4 vertical rails, which I’m sure gives it a lot more stability.
Recently, Amazon was selling the refurbished Fire 7 tablet for less than $40. The new one runs for juts $10 more. So I figured I would order it and see if it would be an option. After spending an hour with it, I felt confident that I can make it work. I’ve been running it for a couple weeks at the time of writing, and it’s been awesome.
I wrote about the Nelly WiFi Doorbell a little over a year ago. At first, I was pretty happy with it. But after a while, it needed to be reset a couple time and it would need a reboot every couple of weeks. It was just a pain to look after it. It’s probably still one of the best options if you require local recording. In my case, I would love to have local recording, but not with this much hassle. I suspect that there’s a chance that the issues may have been the fact that the transformer was 10VA, and that it may have need a little more juice. But I couldn’t find any details as to what it required. I didn’t feel like experimenting with it, so I decided to go with the Ring Pro.
A few weeks ago I installed the Ring Alarm and wrote a post about it. Towards the end, noted that I wanted to integrate it with Home Assistant. Unfortunately, native integration isn’t there yet, but the good news, at least for those running Hass.io, is that there is a Hass.io addon that will integrate all Ring devices via MQTT.
I am currently paying around $27 a month for my monitored home security system. And that's just a system with 3 door sensors, 2 motion, and cellular/battery backup. It's just a dumb system with no connection to the Internet. I have to be at the one keypad to be able to arm it. When I learned Ring has a system that would only have a monthly fee of $10/mo or $100/yr, I decided to take a deep look into it. After a couple hours of reading, it seemed like a no-brainer.
So as someone that has a blog that mainly has posts that either relate to the ESP8266 or Home Assistant, I feel like I should have been using ESPHome a long time ago