Making sensors optional

[deimi]

Today I ordered a bunch of PCBs without the ambient light and Sensirion chip as I don't need this features and it makes the hardware cheaper.
In order to have a clean firmware without any errors, I will disable those sensors in the firmware as well. Either completely remove the parts or make it configurable via Kconfig.

@rbaron are you interested in such a upstream contribution? I'm asking to know if it makes sense to make in a clean way and submit a PR or just make dirty workaround in my personal fork.

[rbaron]

@deimi yes, that's something on my TODO list. I'm happy to review the PR. Some pointers of the implementation I have in mind:

• Sensors flag-gated at the prstlib level
• Kconfig options like CONFIG_PRSTLIB_USE_{X, Y}, defaults to y
• Ideally the ble, zigbee samples should not advertise values for disabled sensors

[deimi]

Ok, sounds good.
I haven't had a detailed look yet, but do you think that zigbee2mqtt (with a single b-parasite.js) will be able to handle flawlessly different kind of b-parasites when they advertise different kind of values?

[rbaron]

That's a good question. Our custom converter b-parasite.js "sets up" all sensors. I actually don't know what would happen if we only had clusters for some of them on the device. I'd guess they would be set up in HA but be unavailable/unknown. We can always disable them manually. I can't find it now, but a while ago I read somewhere that z2m introduced something more automatic for the converters, which would let us get rid of the custom converter, and then I would expect it to work automatically with a subset of sensors.

EDIT: found it:

• feat: Generate definition for unknown devices Koenkk/zigbee-herdsman-converters#6692
• feat: Support automatically generating device definitions Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt#20358

It would be cool if we got this to work (I haven't tested it).

With ZHA I expect it to work out of the box, as long as we flag-gate the cluster definitions in the zigbee sample, because it automatically detects the exposed clusters and turn them into HA entities.

[deimi]

Ok, I will take a look

[flod-1]

Are there any updates? I also want to order, but I don't need the light sensor at all, but I will keep the SHTC3 sensor.

[rbaron]

@flod-1 for now you should be able to ignore the sensor values in the UI. Side note: I also don't use the light sensor on my boards, but I still populate them, because the marginal cost for the phototransistor is so low.