118 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
118 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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slug: making-a-wifi-enabled-smart-air-humidifier
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title: "DIY Smart Appliance: Making a WiFi-enabled smart air humidifier from a regular one"
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tags: [smart home, DIY, ESP8266, ESPHome, humidifier, Wemos D1 mini, WiFi]
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---
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So there was a simple air humidifier… Actually, this post is a good example of how to make your regular boring home appliance a little smarter. The main part of my humidifier will be the Wemos (or Lolin) D1 mini board based on the ESP8266 WiFi chip.
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<!-- truncate -->
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My air humidifier has no automatic turn on and off, no timers, only a regulator that also works like a switch. The idea is to make it WiFi-friendly and work with Home Assistant through MQTT.
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Actually, I was pretty lucky with this device because there are other models of it with built-in sensors, screens, and other stuff so the hardware was prepared to connect additional modules. But we don’t want to measure humidity inside the humidifier right? So the sensor will be a separate part of the system.
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## Teardown
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So it has an AC/DC power supply. Now we need to find 5v power line for our additions. All internal parts are powered with 12V DC so we need a step down module. In my case there was an empty 12V connector right on the factory board:
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## Assembling
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So we will connect there a regulated power down module and set it up to a 5V output:
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Now the main hardware. It is a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266-based board (well almost because in my case it is a no-name copy of it, don’t buy it please) and a beautiful relay brick from Itead Studio:
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Connect it all together. Wemos D1 mini can be powered with stable 5V DC power connected to its 5V pin:
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Now we need to unsolder the wires from a factory button or switch and connect it to our relay:
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The last step will be gluing all new parts inside our device. Don’t repeat my mistake and glue the WiFi board with micro-USB port pointing outside of the humidifier, not inside it:
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## Improvements
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The final version of my humidifier also checks the state of the factory switch and reports the state to [MQTT binary sensor](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/binary_sensor.mqtt) in Home Assistant. Here is a final diagram of this project:
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The software was also improved. There was [WiFiManager for ESP8266](https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager) boards added to make it possible to configure WiFi and MQTT settings without flashing the board.
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## The code
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The old code was missing long time ago.
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## Home Assistant
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An example of MQTT platform switch configuration in Home Assistant for humidifier:
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```yaml
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switch:
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– platform: mqtt
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name: "Humidifier"
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state_topic: "edwin/humidifier/state"
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command_topic: "edwin/humidifier/power"
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state_on: "on"
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state_off: "off"
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payload_on: "1"
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payload_off: "0"
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```
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## ESPHome migration
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And finally here is a YAML configuration of my humidifier after it was migrated to [ESPHome](https://esphome.io):
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```yaml
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esphome:
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name: humidifier
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platform: ESP8266
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board: d1_mini
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wifi:
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ssid: "****"
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password: "************"
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# Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails
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ap:
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ssid: "Edwin Humidifier"
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password: "************"
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captive_portal:
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# Enable logging
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logger:
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# Enable Home Assistant API
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api:
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password: "************"
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ota:
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password: "************"
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switch:
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- platform: gpio
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name: "Humidifier"
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pin: D1
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restore_mode: ALWAYS_OFF
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binary_sensor:
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- platform: gpio
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name: "Humidifier state"
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pin:
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number: D5
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mode: INPUT
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``` |