I’ve been reading many blogs, forums, articles and stuff. I came to the conclusion that openHAB will work for my home automation project. The question is, which version of the ESP module will be most suitable for my needs.
What I need is (mostly) gather sensors data and in some places add an actuator (relay). I’d rather use a board with more than one IO port. My first option would an Arduino+ESP8266 but I know I can get rid of the Arduino since most recent ESP boards come with many IOs.
I have just a standalone esp8266V12 and it’s a faff to connect to it. Get a Huzzah board from adafruit - It lets you (supposedly) power it from up to 12v, and you can use 5v on the RX port so it’s easier to program.
I wouldn’t bother with an arduino now to be honest.
I’ve been browsing and reading, and looks like there’s a newer version of the ESP-12, the ESP-12F which has an increased range. I guess I’ll go with that one.
Are there any CONs from then openHAB point of view? Should I use another one?
Cons? It’s no different to using an arduino or something else. Personally I’d suggest you push to a message queue as that should make things a lot easier for you.
I guess I’ll have to dig more on the ESP side. Looks like OpenHAB is the right solution, but still need to know more about the board, the I/Os and MQTT messaging working on the ESP.
I have played around with ESP Easy project @ http://www.esp8266.nu/index.php/Main_Page
and it has support for opeHAB MQTT and works good.
Sensor support growing all the time and they just added OLED/LCD support with REST-like API that one can use to send data from openHAB.
In any case very interesting project and fun to play with.
I built a central heating thermostat with it a dht22, relay and an oled screen all controlled with openHAB.
As for hardware Nodemcu 1.0 chip is the easy and stable platform with usb power. others like 12e work fine too but require extra resistors and caps to get to a stable state.
good luck and have fun with it.
I have a bunch of the 8266 boards (various types), sensors and displays on the way. (on a slow boat from China) I can’t wait to play with them. I look forward to hearing what others have done with theirs and how they integrated into OpenHab.
I’m waiting for ESP-12E Module with 4Mb Flash. I’m planning to program it with Firmware from http://www.wifi-iot.ru/ to make it MQTT client with 74HC595 support. Then I want it to control my board of 16 relays using this interface.
I’m quite happy with nodemcu firmware and then using mqtt to communicate with openhab. Right now I use a nodemcu devkit with integrated usb, but I might switch to standalone ones for my next project.
