It ends up losing contact with home assistant regularly for me. All my devices do this (all based on 8266's anyway) and all devices will fall into unavailable for a few seconds. Which is annoying because their return can trigger automations.
Honestly? Nowhere where an ESP32 was a suitable device. Anything that esphome can’t do generally requires more powerful or specialized hardware anyways. I did have some issues with updates killing WiFi on the boards and needing a reflash but I think they fixed that bug. I could also never get the chrome based flasher to work properly when I tried that out.
I've found it to be nearly unusable. The opaque firmware generation is an anti-feature IMO. It also doesn't fucking work. If you change the config, you have to force a full clean and rebuild or you'll get a corrupt image. Building an esp firmware image from scratch takes several minutes every time you want to change a config.
All of the provided controls are bad. It's incredibly difficult to get it on the network. The documentation is laughable.
It took me three hours to get a simple RGB strip working. All it had to do was drive three PWM signals. The esp has hardware specifically for that. It took a lot of effort to even find out how to use the LEDC hardware, much less how to assign a pin and hook it to the color picker.
I also wanted to hang an IR LED off it to control my TV and such. No sort of configurable button panel, you get one giant widget per action.
I did eventually get it working, but honestly it would have been so much faster to just write my own firmware to talk to HA directly.
