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Getting Started

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Daniel Frenkel edited this page Jul 24, 2026 · 1 revision

Getting Started

From bare board to spinning motor in a few minutes.

1. Wire it up

  1. Connect any bipolar (4-wire) stepper motor to the JST-XH plug or the 4-pin screw terminal — coil A on pins 1–2, coil B on pins 3–4. (Not sure which wires are a coil pair? See Troubleshooting.)
  2. Connect a 12–24 V, 2 A+ supply to the barrel jack (center positive) or, on the VAL3100/3101, the 2-pin power terminal. See Power Requirements.

2. Flash firmware (skip if pre-loaded)

Boards ship pre-loaded — standalone boards currently ship with the Ropener firmware as the factory default, which works as a general stepper controller (all buttons and tuning controls are there; the curtain-specific entities are simply unused). If you'd rather run the clean generic build for your board:

  1. Download val3000.factory.bin / val3100.factory.bin / val3101.factory.bin from the latest release
  2. Connect USB-C and flash it from your browser at web.esphome.io — no toolchain needed

If the board isn't detected on a brand-new unit, enter download mode manually: hold BOOT, tap RESET, release BOOT. After the first upload this is automatic.

3. Join it to your Wi-Fi

Two ways:

  • Over USB (easiest): while connected at web.esphome.io, use the three-dot menu → "Configure Wi-Fi" (Improv over serial).
  • Over the hotspot: on first boot (or whenever it can't reach your network) the board opens its own Wi-Fi hotspot named after the device (e.g. val3100-a1b2c3). Connect to it with your phone and enter your Wi-Fi credentials in the captive portal that pops up.

4. Control it

Open a browser to http://<device>-XXXXXX.local (the XXXXXX is the last 3 bytes of the board's MAC address — the same suffix as the hotspot name). You'll get the built-in control panel with every control grouped: Control, Setup, Motion Tuning, StallGuard, and Diagnostics. See the Web UI Reference for what everything does.

If .local doesn't resolve on your network, find the board's IP address in your router's client list and browse to that instead (the IP is also shown under Diagnostics once you're in).

5. (Optional) Add it to Home Assistant

The board speaks the native ESPHome API and is discoverable out of the box — Home Assistant will show it under Settings → Devices & Services as a discovered ESPHome device. Click Configure and every entity from the web UI appears in Home Assistant. No Home Assistant is required, though — the web UI is fully standalone.

Next steps

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