Windows install tips

[Cybgak]

Hi all

First thanks everyone who contributes to this, it's made my Emporia Vue so much more useable with Home Assistant now.
I had a lot of trouble installing it on Windows, mainly due to my own ignorance so I thought I would do a quick post to try and save other people time:
Most of this is the same as the install guide but with some additional steps for those not familiar with ESPhome.
So follow the install guide; install Python, then esptool and backup your original firmware.
One note on connecting to the board; my USB serial adaptor had both 3.3 and 5V outputs and I connected both to get as much power to the ESP as possible which seemed to work well. I had some problems with the USB serial adapter resetting when initially connecting, due to the power drain I presume. I found that just having two loose leads for the IO0 and EN pins and connecting everything else up so the board could boot fully and then just shorting the two loose leads to the metal ESP put the ESP reliably into bootloader mode.
Once the original firmware is backed up there seems to be a step missing from the install guide which is to install esphome:
pip install esphome
If you installed Python via the Windows store like me, you may want to add the location of the packages that you're installing to the path environment variable, otherwise you have to preface all your commands with >python -m
For me that the additional path was %AppData%..\Local\Packages\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.11_qbz5n2kfra8p0\LocalCache\local-packages\Python311\Scripts but you'll need to modify that for your install.
The the other missing piece of the puzzle for me was then creating a folder where I wanted to keep the files for esphome and then right clicking in the folder with shift held down, opening a Powershell (terminal doesn't seem to pickup the path for the packages) window and running the command:
esphome dashboard ./
That sets up the ESPPhome dashboard and then use Chrome or Edge to browse the URL http://127.0.0.1:6052 and from there everything starts to make sense again in the standard install instructions, you can connect to the device over the existing serial connection, create a basic YAML configuration for the device and then copy in everything you need from the example configuration file remembering to keep things like the encryption key from the generated basic YAML file.
Once that's done you should be good to hit the install button and flash the device.
When the flashing is finished just tap tap the loose lead connected to the EN pin on to the metal ESP case and it'll reboot into ESPhome, after which it should then be discovered by Home Assistant and you can set it up in there.

Hope that helps someone save some time :)
Thanks again for the inspiring project.