ESP32 + Home Assistant builds
How‑To‑Geek published three weekend‑friendly ESP32 Home Assistant projects — smart energy monitor, environmental station, and room presence detector — all with ESPHome integration, and a new ESP32 DIN‑rail 65W Hi‑Fi amp (Esparagus Audio Brick) launched via crowdfunding with Home Assistant & Squeezelite support projects amp. These are low‑cost, productionizable DIY paths for audio and sensing that plug straight into Home Assistant.
The Waveshare ESP32‑P4 4‑inch display used in the dashboard project includes dual onboard microphones with echo cancellation and HTG says the kit can be built for about $50. howtogeek.com HTG points to a walkthrough video and a ready‑made YAML on GitHub so the LVGL UI and local voice‑assistant setup can be reused instead of rebuilding the interface from scratch. howtogeek.com The “streaming dashboard” route renders Home Assistant in headless Chromium and sends only changed JPEG tiles to the ESP32 over WebSocket — an approach shown in the Remote WebView project and implemented in community GitHub clients. community.home-assistant.io The Esparagus Audio Brick is built around Espressif ESP32/ESP32‑S3 modules with 16 MB flash, 8 MB PSRAM, optional W5500 Ethernet, and a TAS5825M stereo I²S DAC/amp with DSP and output modes that reach up to 65 W. cnx-software.com The Esparagus crowdfunding campaign is live on Crowd Supply (campaign page shows a $59 purchasing option and an Apr 23, 2026 end date), and Sonocotta’s GitHub repo and Crowd Supply updates publish firmware, schematics, and early beta tester notes. crowdsupply.com
