OttoWinter
commented
5 years ago https://beta.esphomelib.com/esphomeyaml/components/api.html + https://rc--home-assistant-docs.netlify.com/blog/2019/01/04/release-85/ :)
You got quite close to how I actually just did it ;) also using protobuf and a custom protocol. But it's just using TCP sockets over WiFi - that's primarily because everything else (MQTT, OTA) should still work side-by-side
The goal is to one day move to ESP-Mesh with that custom protocol. But also not in the near future because I think the new native API is already quite good in a few key metrics - latency is in a similar time range you posted (though I don't recommend writing high perfomance applications with esphomelib anyway), and message sizes are quite small.
Power consumption+Range are the only factors speaking for espnow/mesh for me. For the former: we're talking about devices that use 1W max here (except for deep sleep uses of course). But if i've learned one thing from the recent native API, it's that mesh/now will be an absolute ton of work.
xlfe
Is your feature request related to a problem/use-case? Please describe. I'm interested in seeing whether it would be possible to use ESPNOW instead of a normal Wifi connection. This would also remove MQTT from the picture - you would presumably need a ESP device dedicated as a HUB connected to HA via USB which acted as the HUB to the rest of your ESP devices over ESPNOW.
Describe the solution you'd like Ability to use esphomelib without wifi and mqtt - to enable low latency control of ESP devices from HASS.
Additional context MQTT is slow (or at least slow when you consider a point to point message is <50ms). Wifi is unreliable and requires more power usage for ESP devices than ESPNOW. I have been working on this concept for a little while using https://github.com/xlfe/PJON-cython as a transport mechanism https://github.com/xlfe/reticul8 - but I was targeting Arduino and ESP devices.
I think it would require:-
Interested in your thoughts on whether it makes sense to figure out ESPNOW support (and therefore esphomelib integration with HASS without the use of MQTT and Wifi).