I actually have a working'ish prototype of this project laying on my table right now.
It's a 120mm noctua fan being controlled by pwm i relation to the temperature. It also has an oled screen to show temp and fan speed. All controlled trough home assistant via esphome.
I say working'ish because the temp sensor i'm using (dht11) is unreliable and is messing up half the time, so i'm looking into buying a DS18B20 instead.
I'd be happy to share schematics and code if you'd like it.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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You're pretty rad, y'know that?
If you want to do this as an ESP project anyway, you don't need the extra controller.
Fans take a simple PWM signal, which your ESP (or even one of the smallest Arduinos) can create easily.
Good point, I found this: Tutorial - How to control a PWM fan with an ESP32 and Home Assistant ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-AZF6udg-Q ) I'm just going to do that but with more fans
Yeah - most mcu’s can do this without home assistant. However if your coding skills are worse than your eps-home skills then using HomeAssistant with an esp is a solid solution.
I think pretty much any mosfet / h-bridge / motor control board with pwm should do.
If you have those 4-wire fans with a pwm input that accepts 3V3 logic, you might even be able to attach them directly to the ESP:
But that's not all fans, I had some mixed results with that.