Home Assistant Espruino Integration ⚡🏡

[gfwilliams]

Home Assistant is an awesome project that glues together all the separate 'smart home' appliances, allowing them to work together, while running as much as possible completely locally. It even contains its own voice assistant.

Part of the project is something called ESPHome which (while not related to Espruino) allows you to install custom firmware on ESP32 devices, using them as Bluetooth->WiFi bridges (Most Shelly devices also do this out of the box).

This is awesome as it allows you to easily make your own low-power Bluetooth sensors that can appear in Home Assistant alongside everything else. There's an Espruino library to make this easy at https://www.espruino.com/BTHome

However what we've lacked so far as a nice way to send stuff to your Espruino devices. But that's now changed!

The Home Assistant Espruino integration is now available for manual install at https://github.com/espruino/homeassistant-espruino

It allows you to send arbitrary JS commands to your Espruino devices from Home Assistant, but best of all, you can run the Web IDE inside Home Assistant, using Home Assistant's own Bluetooth for communications. So you can program and check on your Espruino devices from wherever you are:

[gfwilliams]

I should add I'm very open to suggestions (and PRs!) for this. It's still early days, but for instance I feel like some method in the UI to create custom entities which set bluetooth characteristics would be really handy - as understandably not everyone will want to leave the UART connection open on their Espruino devices.

[SimonGAndrews]

This all seems pretty neat. Will take a deeper look. Thanks @gfwilliams

[yerpj]

I'm so happy Espruino is finally reaching Home Assistant ecosystem! I have been using btHome on Espruino for years and while it works exceptionnally well for uplink traffic, Espruino devices were until now only reachable from Home Assistant via WLED as far as I remember.
I always wanted to use Espruino devices to display information from the Home Assistant database (sensors, actuator status mostly) but never reached this point so far. Sure UART is a way of doing it. I had a quick look if any existing project tends to formalize a "generic" GATT service for bidirectionnal data/command traffic, seems mostly inexistant. Even in ESPHome nothing seems to be built atop esp32_ble_server.
I don't know, at this stage, if specifying such a GATT service would be easy or not, but at least it could be a good attractor for home assistant guys into Espruino project.
If I had to do it myself, I would certainly begin with a "uart-like" service, with both a "downlink" and "uplink" characteristics, notify enabled, but except from leaving the NUS available for other use, it does not provide much value, at least it doesn't help users too much on developping application code.

I am curious to hear from other users what they could bring on the table from their own experiences

[gfwilliams]

devices were until now only reachable from Home Assistant via WLED as far as I remember.

Yes, exactly. It was a bit of a pain.

I had a quick look if any existing project tends to formalize a "generic" GATT service for bidirectionnal data/command traffic

There was one at https://community.home-assistant.io/t/generic-bluetooth-integration/648952 but I don't think it got much love, and was a bit of a pain as you had to write your own configs.

It might be nice to have a way to do something simlar, but set up via the UI.

I did have a rough idea about how to use the UART to transmit from Espruino (by advertising the # of bytes ready to send), but I feel like that doesn't fit well with Home Assistant - I don't even know what you'd do with random UART data events. BTHome works much better.

For sending to Espruino I really wanted BTHome to introduce a spec for sending data (eg an entity type to advertise that showed that you could connect and write something to a special characteristic). I did contact them but they weren't very interested in the idea though.

[enaon]

For sending to Espruino I really wanted BTHome to introduce a spec for sending data (eg an entity type to advertise that showed that you could connect and write something to a special characteristic). I did contact them but they weren't very interested in the idea though.

I have some 15 espruino powered solar lights in the garden, they act as PIR sensors as well, 4 espruino powered gardena valves, and many espruino table lamps inside the house. HA is nice but feels like an overkill, it needs scanners etc. I have been playing with the idea of a connection based routing protocol, the aim is to have a standalone network. Would you be interested in this?