Home Assistant

I recently covered the extremely cheap and popular ESP32-CAM here on the site. That is still a good choice but I wanted to evaluate some of the other camera options out there.

One of the camera modules I chose to try was the ESP-EYE. This is actually an official product by Espressif (the company who make the ESP modules). It comes as one solid piece unlike the ESP32-CAM. It also has beefier on-board specs than the ESP32-CAM.

In this guide I’ll show you how to set up a completely open-source Home Assistant camera view with the ESP-EYE using ESPHome. Let’s get started!

I’ve been integrating my entire home into Home Assistant using as much open-source software and hardware as possible. Recently I’ve wanted to add some additional cameras to my home such as a camera to monitor my HVAC / water heater.

Although I already have 6 Unifi cameras integrated into the home those are extremely expensive (and frankly availability is poor on them as well). I don’t need a camera that costs hundreds of dollars to watch my utilities area.

Fortunately there’s an extremely widely available and cheap solution called the ESP32-CAM! These have been around for years and are one of the most popular ESP32 products. Since it uses ESP32 we can use ESPHome and Home Assistant to add a super cheap camera anywhere you’d like.

In this guide I’ll show my ESP32-CAM setup and how to configure it within Home Assistant and ESPHome. Let’s get started!

I’ve been investigating ways to make my garage doors on my home “smart”. My overall goal is to implement them into Home Assistant. I’ve been investigating various options to do this including do-it-yourself with ESP modules (which I’ve used for a lot of other parts of my home automation).

My home is only about 3 years old and came preinstalled with a “dumb” Genie garage door system that does not have smart capabilities. I decided to investigate the official upgrade option offered by the company via their Aladdin smart home upgrade kit as it only cost about $60.

In this guide I’ll cover installing the upgrade kit for Genie garage doors and how well it performed. I’ll also cover implementing it within Home Assistant. Let’s get started!

I’ve been integrating all of my smart home devices into Home Assistant to have everything managed by an open source system. I have a handful of Philips Hue lights but I had not upgraded the entire house to smart lighting yet. After some research I was delighted to find a set of smart bulbs that are able to be managed by ESPHome (the system that is controlling my smart sensors I’m placing around the house which I’ve covered here).

These are WiFi-based lights described as “made for Home Assistant” running a ESP32 chip. This worked well for my setup as my home has 6 Unifi access points all throughout the house/garage/etc. which is why I didn’t go with a Zigbee or Z-wave solution for the lighting (although I may for my window and door sensors, that’s still a work in progress).

In this guide I’ll show you what it looks like to set up and configure these to work with Home Assistant and ESPHome. Let’s get started!