General question. My Alarm Pro and GDO Blaq are adopted in the ESPHome Builder add-in in Home Assistant. Every time the Add In updates (typically several times a month), all devices adopted there are prompted to update, including the AlarmPro and Blaq.
Is it needed/recommended to update the devices in ESPHome Builder whenever the add-in updates? If not, what is the best/recommended way to keep the devices up to date?
Thanks!
Yep, you’re right that ESPHome updates very frequently. ESPHome is an open-source firmware project and they operate on a monthly release cycle. Often there are multiple releases per month because of bug-fix and patch releases on top of each monthly scheduled release.
Home Assistant and ESPHome builder will prompt you to update your ESPHome devices every time the underlying firmware platform updates – but this isn’t really necessary to do that frequently.
ESPHome is more of a framework for building IoT device firmware – and Konnected’s device firmware leverages ESPHome’s capabilities and libraries to build our device firmware. When you adopt a Konnected device into ESPHome builder, it essentially layers Konnected’s device-specific firmware configuration on top of ESPHome’s base.
ESPHome’s base firmware is updating at least monthly, but Konnected’s device configuration is updated much less frequently. For the most part, updates to ESPHome’s base firmware are irrelevant to the core functionality of your Konnected device.
My advice to you would be to watch Konnected’s ESPHome project release notes: Releases · konnected-io/konnected-esphome · GitHub
When Konnected releases an update to our device-specific firmware configuration, I recommend that you update that device which will pull in both Konnected’s updates and the latest ESPHome base firmware simultaneously. It’s not really necessary at all to update every time ESPHome updates.
Hope that helps!