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.
That’s one badass-looking solder-sucker
those silicone tube tipped ones are awesome. squishes and contours around to seal the spot for better solder removal and replacable tip if it gets damaged
Pity I’m terrible at using it. I’m going to have to look up some tutorials. I ended up chomping off the pcb around the headers
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
