RBgrid

Run it inside Home Assistant

If Home Assistant is already the place you look, RBgrid can live there instead of beside it: the same measurement core, flashed as an ESPHome device, with every circuit on your Energy dashboard and no second app to keep.

What you need

An ESP32 with 16 MB flash and PSRAM — a WROVER, or an S3 on the N16R8 module — the same board as the standalone firmware, plus your rbAmp modules. On the software side: Home Assistant 2026.1 or later with HACS, and, if you build it into your own configuration, ESPHome 2026.5.3 or later on the ESP-IDF framework.

Flash the hub

Download the factory image for your board from the package's release page, then open web.esphome.io in Chrome or Edge, choose Connect, pick your board's serial port, choose Install and select the file you downloaded. There are two images: one for the ESP32-WROVER, one for the ESP32-S3.

Set Wi-Fi right after flashing, over the same USB cable, when the installer offers it — then the hub never needs its setup access point at all. If you do use the access point, change its password once the hub is adopted.

Or build it into your own configuration

If you already keep your ESPHome devices as YAML, add the component as an external source instead of flashing a factory image:

yaml
  external_components:
    - source:
        type: git
        url: https://github.com/rb-amp/rbgrid-esphome
        ref: v1.2.0   # the tag of the release you are installing — see the repository's Releases
        path: esphome/components
      components: [rbgrid]

esptool works too: the factory image is written at offset 0x0.

⚠️ Do not use ESPHome's own Manual download → Factory format. That export assumes the application sits at 0x10000; this image puts it at 0x20000, so a board flashed that way will not boot. Use the factory image from the release page, esphome run, or an over-the-air update.

Add it to Home Assistant

Order matters here. Add the hub in the ESPHome integration first — Home Assistant will have found it on its own — and only then add the RBgrid integration.

The RBgrid integration is not in the HACS default list, so searching HACS for it finds nothing until you have added it yourself. In HACS, add https://github.com/rb-amp/rbgrid-ha as a custom repository, category Integration. It appears in Home Assistant as RBgrid.

  • A hub exposes twelve measurement slots — the same twelve the hub keeps history for. Each slot's name is there from the start; the rest of a slot's entities appear when you bind a point to it, so what you see after adoption is twelve names rather than twelve devices' worth of empty sensors.
  • If you free a slot and give it to a different point, that slot's lifetime totals carry on from where they were, so Home Assistant's statistics can show a step at the changeover. The per-point series the integration imports is the clean view of it.
  • One currency throughout: whatever your tariff is in, every money entity is in.
  • The energy entities go straight onto the Energy dashboard — they are the cumulative kind it expects, so there is nothing to template and no utility_meter to build.

Licence

The ESPHome component and the Home Assistant integration are MIT. The standalone hub firmware is published under PolyForm Noncommercial and that licence does not apply here: these two packages are MIT in their own right.

Next

The package on GitHub The Home Assistant integration What hardware do I need? How the prices work