Home Automation

Monitoring air quality in our living spaces is becoming increasingly important, especially in times when environmental awareness and health play a central role. In this blog post, we will take a look at integrating a PMS5003T fine dust sensor with an ESP32 microcontroller. We will use the ESPHome framework for programming and the Home Assistant platform for displaying and monitoring the data. Additionally, a custom-designed enclosure will be used, which was designed with FreeCAD and manufactured using a 3D printer.

In the world of Smart Home, it's not uncommon for us to rely on various integrations and components to seamlessly integrate our devices into our automated home. I personally have been using Home Assistant for a long time and was particularly enthusiastic about the community integration "home-assistant-bosch-custom-component," which allowed me to read the data from my gas heating system via the KM100 Gateway. However, with the introduction of Home Assistant Version 2024.2.1, everything changed – the beloved integration became unusable due to incompatibilities with Python 3.12 and its dependent libraries.

Operating Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine via KVM/QEMU on Linux offers the best of both worlds: Full add-on support like on a Raspberry Pi, combined with the excellent performance and reliability of a true server.