Hi All,
I'm a first time Festool owner as of the last couple of days having picked up a Track SAW (TSC 55) and absolutely love it. So Hi everyone!
I wanted to share my succes story on using my cordless saw with my generic shop vac for auto on. While I would not be surprised if I end up getting a Festool Dust Extractor one day, I currently have a Karcher shop vac that had a power sensing outlet so I was a little hesitant in going cordless with losing the auto vacuum on capability. But I'm also into my home automation and felt confident I could manage to make something work and the good news is that I could.
Now first the warning/caveat, this is not a soultion so for someone not technical and possibly not running existing home automation/IOT of some sort. It is not a self contained solution but if you are already running Home Assistant and like DIY, this may be of interest. It also may prompt other solutions.
At a high level, the solution I have implemented is as follows:
- The festool battery outputs a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon signal (repeatedly every 1-2s) when set to pairing or when activated by the tool (saw).
- A device that can monitor BLE signals is always listening for this specific signal from either battery, in my case I use an ESP32 chip running ESPresense (
https://espresense.com/), more detail below
- A home automation platfrom runs actions on the detection of this BLE Signal via the listener
- The action is to turn on a standard wall smart plug that the home automation can talk to.
- After a set period 3-5s of no new signal, the outlet is turned off.
- The vacuum just needs to be turned to on (not Auto) and then it kicks in.
That is it at a high level, I'll provide further detail about my exact setup but thought a high level summary may be useful for all.
The Detail...Festool BLE Signal Detection:- As mentioned, I used ESPresense (
https://espresense.com/) and flashed a spare ESP32 board I had around (something like this
https://www.amazon.com.au/DIGISHUO-ESP-WROOM-32-Development-Microcontroller-Integrated/dp/B097DCN76N)
- I just have it plugged into a usb power plug and no pretty box for the moment.
- There is full how to on the espresense site including how to connect to your Home Automation MQTT server after you have installed the software on the ESP32
- Once it is connected to MQTT, I used "MQTT Explorer" to monitor the new updates from ESPresense - it detected phones etc, but importantly, when I activated the battery pairing or the saw, new signals appeared which were from the Festool batteries.
- Using the ESPresnse web interface (see docs), I could filter the monitoring to only the ID's from each battery and restart
- After doing all the above, I only see new MQTT messages when either battery is triggered
Automation:- I use Home Assistant and Node-Red for my home automation and IOT stuff
- I setup Node Red to monitor the 2 MQTT topics that are published by ESPresense when the batteries called out
- When a signal is detected on either topic, 2 things happen:
1. Turn on service is called for the Smart Plug the vacuum is connected to
2. A 3 second timer is started or restarted then on completion of the timer, a turn off call is made to the smart plug
- The Festool batteries keep producing a signal very couple of seconds so you want a timer that restarts upon each signal so the plug only turns off a couple of seconds after the last signal.
Other points:- I added an IOT on/off switch to the vaccum so that I could turn on the vaccum power without following the cord to the wall. In my case, it is an Ikea Tadfri light switch that talks over Zigbee as I had a spare one, but anything that can send a signal to the Home Automation works. If it was easy to, I would have added it to the hose Festool style but but the seitch was better double side taped to the vacuum itself. This way I can still use the vacuum for my router/sander using the auto on for corded tools.
- The way mine is setup is all communication is local on my network, no cloud IOT services utilised, it is close to instant when I turn the saw on. If you were using a smart plug that relied on cloud, it may be frustratingly slow.
- The way I'm detecting the Festool Bluetooth is one of many ways to do it, the signal sent by the batteries is basic and open and anything that can listen and act on BLE signals could be utilised - I may refine what I've done over time but as a proof of concept, it worked and I will keep using it from here forward.
Sorry for the long first post, but I'd read people trying to do similar and was excited to share this and as mentioned, it is probably the high level process that is of interest rather than the specifics. This means that it should be possible to do similar with other tools or technologies that others may have or be familiar with.
Happy to answer questions or provide more info.
Cheers
Giggs
