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.
I’ve looked at ESPHome, but this still means I have to build a circuit board with the ESPHome core device, if I understand correctly? This would certainly work, but it seems wasteful to me when I don’t really need a microcontroller at all, just an ADC that HA can read. If this is the best option, though, I’m open to the idea.
I use esp32 dev boards, they are very cheap for this kind of thing. You dont need to make a circuit board, other than the voltage divider which youll need anyway. Then its just a bit of esphome code and you are done. They dont use much power either.
An “ADC that HA can read” sounds exactly like a job for a microcontroller to me?