I have a few Wemo devices that have been obsoleted by Belkin. The lights are zigbee so paired just fine with the sky connect dongle. this is the controller, I pulled the board with the now dumb smarts out and in the base is a nice 3.3v power supply. so printed a separator from the scary voltage, and reused the headers to bring the low voltage up to the esp32. I needed a Bluetooth proxy in the lounge for a few Shelly remotes I picked up.
Nice! Always good to convert something that is no longer supported.
For future projects, I would also suggest using the SEEED studio Xiao series https://www.tinytronics.nl/index.php?route=product%2Fsearch&search=seeed+studio+xiao if you don’t need a lot of IO, which is often the case with IOT stuff. I use it for everything HomeAssistant related.
The esp32-c3 version for the cheapest with a nice antenna if you have to put the module near metal (my homemade doorbell uses this)
The esp32-S3 model for more processing power (my VoiceAssistant satellite uses this)
Esp32-c6 variant to replace the esp32-c3 for everything that you want to convert to Thread in the future (esphome is starting to have Thread support https://esphome.io/components/openthread/)
Esp32 board are great, but the xiao series is so tiny that you never have to worry about them not fitting!
Yeah that was my original plan, I’ve got a handful of the tiny seed ones. But the Esphome easy setup for the Bluetooth repeater doesn’t support the c3 or anything newer. https://esphome.io/projects/ turns out the length of the esp32 I had matches perfectly the length of the wemo board I ripped out too, so fitted just fine.
It’s also nice to use up some of the older boards in my stash. Living in New Zealand I tend to keep a decent supply of parts as they are always time consuming to get. I’ve got a few too many 8266’s left still!
Isn’t still the ESP-8266 still cheaper ☺️ ?
I made a webserver on one back in the day.
Wild they are all so cheap nowadays, makes me want to do some weird network thing with a handfull of them.
Yeah the 8266 is cheaper but very limited in ram and only does 2.4ghz WiFi