Use ESPHome instead of Blynk?

[RolandWijnen]

Looking at the code to better understand how CoopCommand interfaces with the ESPCam, I thought about the following. The ESPCam board can also be flashed with ESPHome. ESPHome is fairly simple to program so that it interfaces with CoopCommand over the UART bus (as it is working now). This would integrate seamlessly with my Home Assistant.

This made me think about making CoopCommand more dynamic by sending the sensor readings: temp, humidity, watertemp, illuminance) every 30 minutes or so. I could then show the cam feed and sensor information on a nice card in the Home Assistant interface.

Have you considered using ESPHome => https://esphome.io/? It might make it easier to deploy ESPCam than using Blynk. Curious to hear your thoughts on this.

I'll start some experimenting of my own with ESPHome code in the meantime.

[hms-11]

Hey @RolandWijnen,

I've been considering a switch to ESPHome but haven't been able to spend enough time to really dig into it. It certainly seems like something that could be made to work through that system.

Let me know if you make any progress, I'm currently in the middle of another ESP32 based project (garden irrigation system based on soil moisture sensors) so I won't be able to do much digging right now but probably by fall I can spend more time looking at Blynk alternatives.

I've actually now migrated most of my projects to the "new" Blynk. Unfortunately the free tier is very limited but I have enough devices in operation that it made sense for me to step up to the next package. New Blynk has a really slick dynamic provisioning setup that makes OTA a breeze as well as user-provisioning of new devices.