Selfhosted @lemmy.world TCB13 @lemmy.world 9mo ago

Alternative to Home Assistant for ESPHome Devices

Hello,

My IoT/Home Automation needs are centered around custom built ESPHome devices and I currently have them all connected to a HA instance and things work fine.

Now, I like HA's interface and all the sugar candy, however I don't like the massive amounts of resources it requires and the fact that the storage usage keeps growing and it is essentially a huge, albeit successful, docker clusterfuck.

Is there any alternative dashboard that just does this:

Specifically made for ESPHome devices - no other devices required;
Single daemon or something PHP/Python/Node that you can setup manually with a few systemd units;
Connects to the ESPHome devices, logs the data and shows a dashboard with it;
Runs offline, doesn't go into 24234 GitHub repositories all the time and whatnot.

Obviously that I'm expecting more manual configuration, I'm okay with having to edit a config file somewhere to add a device, change the dashboard layout etc. I also don't need the ESPHome part that builds and deploys configurations to devices as I can do that locally on my computer.

Thank you.

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Consider running HA in a light weight systemd-nspawn container with minimal debian. No docker, only install the repositories you need. HACS if needed. Run your own database on the side somewhere and let HA use it.

By itself HA is fairly lightweight already.
- I was trying to go that route with LXC actually and while it seems great what about the ESPHome addon? I'm not even sure if that thing is required to use ESPHome devices or not.
  
  It's not needed, and you can run it separately standalone if you do want it as well.
  
  It’s not needed,
  
  For what exactly? Can I still add the ESPHome devices to HA without the addon installed, is the addon only for flashing the devices?
  
  Thanks.
  
  Correct, the discovery process where you add them doesn't actually involve the addon and works fine without it. The addon is just a wrapper for the standalone ESPhome web UI. It's also not the only way to author and flash a config to a device, you can do it from any computer and on the command line.
  
  Thank you for clarifying this. I was aware I could flash devices on my computer (I did a few times because a few of my boards ESP32-S2-Mini have to be flashed once by the Flash Download Tool from espressif). Maybe I'll run the ESPHome WebUI on my computer or use the cli, I'll see.
  
  I'll proceed to install the HA Core + HACS on a LXC container and see how it goes.

50 comments