Version 1.7.0

Wow, what a week! As you may know, I wrote a blog post on the Home Assistant web site and since then, the amount of esphomelib users has grown sixfold according to the number of GitHub clones!

Version 1.7.0 of esphomelib brings with it (again) a lot of awesome features. One I’m particularly excited about is the new ESP32 BLE Beacon, with it I can finally track reliably whether my devices are home or not without wasting too much battery. But also the new remote receivers and remote transmitters have allowed me to add about ~15 433MHz lights into Home Assistant.

In the next couple of weeks I unfortunately won’t be able to “innovate” as quickly as in the previous weeks, as I will be travelling a lot (and enjoying my vacation 😎), so don’t expect too many awesome features 😸

ESP32 BLE Beacon

Status LED

WiFi Signal Strength

ESP32 BLE Beacon

Status LED

WiFi Signal Strength

Duty Cycle Sensor

Pulse Counter for ESP8266

Remote Transmitter

Duty Cycle Sensor

Pulse Counter for ESP8266

Remote Transmitter

Remote Receiver

Remote Receiver

New Components

  • New WiFi signal strength sensor by @brandond. So now you can monitor how strong the WiFi signal is for your node 📶

  • You can now create a BLE iBeacon with your ESP32s using the new BLE Beacon component.

  • esphomelib has finally gained support for a status LED. Now you can quickly identify if everything is OK with your ESP with a quick look at this LED. Happy blinking!

  • The pulse counter sensor has been back-ported to the ESP8266, so now you can observe the number of pulses and frequency on any pin 🔢

  • A new duty cycle sensor has been added, allowing you to measure how much of the time a specific pin is HIGH or LOW. Can for example be used to detect if a status LED on an external device is blinking or permanently on.

  • The new remote receiver and remote transmitter components now allows you to use any 433MHz receivers and senders with ESPHome. Currently, you will need to use the raw data as described in this guide, but in the future more protocols will be supported out of the box.

New Features

  • While all automations were previously already performed on the ESP itself, they only triggered when an active WiFi and MQTT connection existed. Large parts of the WiFi and MQTT clients has now been rewritten to allow for automations to be executed asynchronously, while the device is still connecting to WiFi.

  • The Hass.io add-on now has a new password option with which you can secure your installation. See Getting Started with ESPHome and Home Assistant. 🔒

  • Binary Sensors now have filters too. They can now be used to debounce any binary sensor and do some more complicated actions using lambdas. See Binary Sensor Filters. ⛹️‍

  • All components can now be flagged internal. Doing so will prevent them from being represented in the front-end (like MQTT). Useful for on-device automations. See 😎

  • The Deep Sleep Component now has a wakeup_pin_mode option for the ESP32. This option can be used to tell esphomelib what to do if the wakeup pin is already in the wakeup level when attempting to enter deep sleep. 🛌

  • There are two new triggers available now: esphomeyaml.on_boot and esphomeyaml.on_shutdown with which you can do some advanced cleanup/setup on boot and shutdown of the node.

  • All Hass.io add-on builds have now been more or less completely automated using a private Gitlab server. You can find all the new docker files here.

  • Added a new build_path option in the esphomeyaml section with which you can customize where esphomeyaml stores the platformio project files. See ESPHome Core Configuration.

Breaking Changes

  • Fixed the SHT3x-D component and removed the accuracy parameter. The accuracy now defaults to HIGH.

  • The inverted option of binary sensors has been moved into the filters: section. So instead of

    binary_sensor:
  - platform: ...
    # ...
    inverted: True

    you would now write:

    binary_sensor:
  - platform: ...
    # ...
    filters:
      - invert:

  • The esp32_ble component and platform have been renamed to esp32_ble_tracker in order to make the naming clearer with the new esp32_ble_beacon component.

  • The receive_timeout option has been removed from the i2c component as it turns out it didn’t actually do anything.

  • The ir_transmitter component has been renamed to remote_transmitter as it now works with all kinds of protocols, not just infrared-based ones.

  • The pull_mode option of the Pulse Counter has been removed, please use the Pin Schema now instead. Additionally, the internal_filter option now only accepts time units.

Other Contributions

(Not in any order and probably missed some, still figuring this changelog stuff out…)

And last but not least, check out this awesome video by The Hook Up for using esphomeyaml to create a simple wireless doorbell: