Home Assistant, KNX, and ESPHome

Several year ago, I read the book “The humane interface” from “Jef Raskin”. The main thing that stuck to me was the first chapter “keep the simple simple”. Setting up our smart home, this is one of the things I was keeping in mind when building automations. The backbone of our wiring is KNX, and we mainly use buttons resembling good old light switches. From the optics they’re pretty plain, and their usability is rather intuitive. However, thanks to KNX and Home Assistant, these switches can be extended to create additional useful functionality.

Recently, the heatbed of my beloved Anycubic I3 mega stopped working. The 3d printer is a tool I use quite often to mak replacement parts, build enclosures for small IoT projects or to create helpful tools I can use for woodworking. When checking the controller board, I quickly found, that the mosfet controlling the heatbed was defect. Since I wanted to get my printer running again quickly, and I didn’t have a matching mosfet at hand, I decided to order a new controller board from Amazon instead of trying to replace it first. Unfortunately, it was a bit more difficult to get it working then I was hoping for.