I have a rainwater collection system that feeds into several water tanks. I’d like to be able to monitor the tank levels for a variety of reasons, first and foremost because of the fact that we get almost no rain in the summer, and I have run the tanks to empty before.
In the past, I have used Milone eTape connected to an Atmel microcontroller to monitor water levels for a few different applications. I’d like to use this again if possible.
The eTape essentially acts as a potentiometer in a circuit. I’ve done some research on various ways to feed this into HomeAssistant, but I’m not really sure what’s best. My water tanks are just behind the wall from my HA server, so I could connect directly with USB, serial, or ethernet. WiFi or Zigbee or also options; nearly every other device I have connected to HA is Zigbee.
What I’m ideally looking for is a device that can take a voltage level between 0-5VDC, or a 5k potentiometer, and feed the result into HA. Building something isn’t out of the question (as long as I can program it in C or C++), but an off-the-shelf solution that integrates with HA would be ideal.
Definitely read the docs but yes your edit is correct. In ESPHome (in HA) you’ll just edit the config file to tell it, for example, that GPIO pin 5 is connected to a potentiometer and then this becomes an entity in HA.
I’d recommend getting some ESP8266 Wemos D1 mini boards as they’re better suited to this and half the cost of ESP32.
Also you may consider other sensors you could use in this same area like temperature, lux, humidity, etc as they can all be run off the same ESP device in the same ESPHome config and you’ll have plenty of free pins.