Personally it made it very easy to build custom sensors/actuators for my Home Assistant setup. I have a folder with a bunch of esphome configs and just point Claude Code at it and tell it to add new entries for the stuff that I need, it's really good at that it can even write drivers for specific sensors autonomously. Granted you still need to do the wiring/soldering by hand (for now!)
Just around the home I have:
- a board that captures the audio output from my vinyl player and streams it on my LAN (so I can play my records on speakers across the house)
- one esp32 in each of my DIY speakers around the house driving the DAC+amplifier
- smart plant sensors that measure soil humidity, temperature, etc.
- a camera inside of a bird house, solar powered
- a 8x8 lidar ToF distance measurement board for detecting sleep phase
Just around the home I have:
- a board that captures the audio output from my vinyl player and streams it on my LAN (so I can play my records on speakers across the house)
- one esp32 in each of my DIY speakers around the house driving the DAC+amplifier
- smart plant sensors that measure soil humidity, temperature, etc.
- a camera inside of a bird house, solar powered
- a 8x8 lidar ToF distance measurement board for detecting sleep phase