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Home Assistant

PlancH talks to Home Assistant through the native ESPHome API: no MQTT broker, no cloud. You choose what it controls with labels: PlancH finds the devices by itself and groups them by room (area) and type, so adding a lamp to the panel takes one click and no new firmware.

1 · Install the PlancH package

The package homeassistant/planch.yaml creates the sensor sensor.planch_menu, which collects the labelled devices with their state and sends them to the panel.

  1. In the Home Assistant configuration folder (the one with configuration.yaml) create a folder packages and copy planch.yaml into it.

  2. If configuration.yaml does not load packages yet, add at the top level:

    homeassistant:
  packages: !include_dir_named packages

  3. Developer tools → YAML → Check configuration, then restart Home Assistant.

  4. In Developer tools → States you find sensor.planch_menu: its state is the number of labelled devices (0 for now).

2 · Add the board

  1. Flash the firmware and let the board join your Wi-Fi.
  2. Home Assistant discovers it: open Settings → Devices & services, find PlancH under Discovered and click Configure. If it is not discovered, click Add integration → ESPHome and enter the board's IP address (or planch.local).
  3. On the ESPHome integration, open the PlancH device options (Configure) and enable Allow the device to perform Home Assistant actions. Without it the menu shows up but the keys do nothing.

3 · Choose the devices

Create the label PlancH (Settings → Areas, labels & zones → Labels) and put it on the lights, switches (smart plugs), covers and thermostats (climate) you want on the panel.

  • Put it on the entity, to choose exactly what appears; or on the device, to take all its lights, switches, covers and thermostats.
  • A lamp on a smart plug is often a switch: it appears under Switches. To have it under Lights, turn it into a light with the Home Assistant helper Change device type of a switch and label the new light instead.
  • The room is the area of the entity, or of its device. Without an area the device goes under Other.
  • The name shown is the entity name without the room in front ("Living room Lamp" → "Lamp"), cut to 16 characters.

Each room can also show its temperature and humidity: put the label PlancH (or the panel's own label) on a temperature or humidity sensor, or on a device that only has sensors (a thermometer). The sensors of a labelled light, plug, cover or thermostat do not count: many relays and bulbs report their own internal temperature. The package reads, for each room in the menu, the labelled sensors of that area; if there are several of the same type it uses the first by entity id. A sensor in °C or °F without a device class (common with MQTT) also counts as temperature; humidity needs the humidity device class. The temperature appears next to each room in the room list, temperature and humidity next to the title inside a room. A room without labelled sensors (and "Other") simply shows none.

The menu updates by itself: states live, and labels or areas within a couple of seconds (the package includes a small automation, PlancH: refresh the menu when labels or areas change, for that).

Limits

A panel shows at most 8 rooms, 8 devices per room and 32 devices in total: more would not fit in the ESP32 memory nor on the 0.96" display. Beyond the limits the list is cut, the LED D1 turns amber and the room list reads "Rooms (limit!)".

More than one PlancH

Each panel can show its own devices besides the shared ones:

  1. Give the panel a name: on its device page in Home Assistant, under Configuration, type it in the Panel field (for example Studio). No new firmware needed.
  2. Create the label PlancH Studio and put it on the devices for that panel only.

The panel named Studio shows the devices with PlancH and with PlancH Studio; a device can have several labels to appear on more than one panel. A panel without a name, or with a name that has no label, shows the PlancH devices. Names are not case sensitive, and up to 6 named panels are supported.

4 · Assign the scene keys

Create the labels PlancH S1, PlancH S2, PlancH S3 and PlancH S4 and put each one on the scene, script or automation for that key (one entity per label): a scene is turned on, a script is run, an automation is triggered. A key without a label does nothing.

With more panels, PlancH Studio S1 … PlancH Studio S4 set the keys of the panel Studio only, and win over the shared ones.

The LED next to each key shows the active scene: the one activated most recently among the four, also when you activate it from Home Assistant or from an automation (a script also while it runs). When you press a key, its LED turns green if Home Assistant confirms, red on error.

Colours

On a colour light the panel steps through a palette, defined at the top of the palette attribute in planch.yaml. Edit it as you like: name (up to 10 characters), hue (0–360) and saturation (0–100).

{%- set palette = [
  ['White', 0, 0], ['Warm white', 35, 45], ['Orange', 30, 100], ['Red', 0, 100],
  ['Pink', 330, 65], ['Violet', 275, 80], ['Blue', 225, 100], ['Cyan', 185, 90],
  ['Green', 120, 90], ['Yellow', 55, 90]] %}

The favourite colours that Home Assistant shows in the light dialog are stored where templates cannot read them, so the panel uses this list instead. Lights with a white temperature get a White row, lights with effects (WLED and many others) an Effect row: see the Firmware page.

Examples

Status LEDs for the front door or the washing machine, a kitchen timer on the backlight, office and bedside scenes: see Usage examples.