I read about ESP32 devices and home assistant and couldn’t quite believe how many options there are to use them with external devices to get both inputs and outputs home automation wise. I’ve been wanting my own air pressure monitoring ever since the news reports that you could see an effect on air pressure when a volcano went off. So yesterday after dinner I got to work.
Parts
What’s nice is there’s only two real parts to this set up. An ESP32 module and a BME280. Okay plus 4 wires and a wee bit of solder. I exclude home assistant and it’s hardware as that’s running anyway.
Time
It took me about 10 minutes to solder the four wires between the two modules. Then probably about an hour to install ESPHome on my PC and configure the ESP32 device using that. Then about another hour finding the custom gauge card to use in home assistant.
Sadly I also found some of my other graphs not working as I like so got them all fixed whilst I was at it. I added two air pressure graphs daily and weekly. Sadly they are not interesting enough to share yet as air pressure has been steady so just a straight line.
Next steps
I want to add some code so I can get a rising or falling indicator next to the air pressure then use that and current pressure with a bit of a look up tables to give a line of text as a weather prediction.
When ordering my parts I also ordered a few more ESP32 devices and an OLED display and a TFT display as I want to also play with using small displays as extra home assistant outputs.
I’m also interested in some of the other devices to attach to these modules getting air quality as tracked data sounds fun, and my gazebo lighting system in the garden is sick and driving LED strips is an output option. Also for BBQ season a thermocouple and temperature display for the BBQ sounds good. So many ideas!
Bonus
The BME280 also measures temperature and humidity. This means I now have two devices doing that in my room. The other also has a UV sensor and being the ginger that I am plan to get that outside for real UV data this summer.