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Let's do a fresh new start!

· 3 min read
Klaas Schoute
Klaas Schoute
Founder of Glow

The Home Assistant Glow 🌟 has been around for almost 2.5 years now (Jul 28, 2021) and still there is a lot of interest in the project 🙏🏻 (as can be seen from the number of repository stars).

Star History Chart

However, over the past year and a half I've paid little attention to the project, simply because I was too busy studying to become a UX Engineer. Now that I have (almost) graduated, I've a lot more time to spend on the project again and I immediately started working on a refactor of the repository.

Why a refactor?​

In the past I've made a number of choices that have actually made maintaining a small project like the Home Assistant Glow too complex (in my opinion). In addition, I was not satisfied with the documentation and wanted to add more structure in the project.

What has changed?​

TL;DR - A lot 😅 ... v4.0.0 has been released, the most important changes are listed below.

Breaking changes​

  1. The pulse meter pin for ESP32 boards has been changed from GPIO 13 to GPIO 26.
  2. The home_assistant_glow.yaml file no longer exists.

This would break the package_import for existing configs for people in the ESPHome dashboard. If you would like to use the latest version, I recommend re-flashing your ESP according to step 2 in Getting Started, and if desired, re-adopting your device again in ESPHome dashboard (add-on).

New config structure​

Relates to point 2 in the breaking changes.

The configuration YAML for the Home Assistant Glow is now split into multiple files. This makes building the firmware per board type easier without a lot of code duplication.

Documentation website​

The previous website has been replaced with a comprehensive documentation website, accessible at https://glow-energy.io. This new website is built using Docusaurus, a static site generator widely used by various open source projects and hosted on GitHub Pages. It provides more space to present information in a structured format. Additionally, users can conveniently install firmware on their ESP directly from their browser using ESP web tools.

Configuration in UI​

This feature was already present in the old development branch, but never included in a release. From now on, you set the imp/kWh rate via an input field in the device UI or via an entity in Home Assistant.

Building the firmware​

The firmware building process has undergone a significant rewrite, allowing the generation of firmware files tailored to various board types. These files are used in the Getting Started section by ESP web tools.

Moving forward, firmware builds will be tested on a weekly basis. This ensures that build problems with latest versions of ESPHome are identified more quickly, providing new users with up-to-date features and improvements in the future.

That's it! If you would like to support the project you can do so through Github sponsors. If you have any questions, you can ask them via the discussions and if you encounter problems with the Home Assistant Glow, you can indicate this in the issues.

./Klaas