DIY Drum Sander
Backstory: We took down a red oak a couple years ago (Part 1 and Part 2) and I got it milled up for projects. Wifey wants a desk but the grain is a little tricky and my thickness planer just…
Category Technology
Stepped LED Brightness in ESPHome
I use ESPHome for a number of projects including LED task lighting, and my devices often use an inexpensive TTP223 capacitive touch sensor as a button. I like to be able to tap the sensor multiple times to cycle through…
TEMT6000 Illuminance Math with ESPHome
I use inexpensive TEMT6000 sensors in various projects to detect the level of ambient light. I originally hand-coded the firmware, but now I use ESPHome. My projects are usually 3.3V because I use pretty bare boards like ESP-12F instead of…
ESPHome SOS Morse Code Light Effect
I’m using ESPHome with Home Assistant for a bunch of home automation projects. I want to be able to flash some of the lights in a Morse code “SOS” pattern as an annoying alert that something has gone terribly wrong.…
Dealing with ESPHome Disconnects
I have a bunch of ESPHome/ESP8266 projects, several of which are have been plagued by repeated disconnection during seemingly random times of instability. Sometimes they’ll be fine for days, and then suddenly they start acting up again, and it can…
iPhone Presence across VLANs with Home Assistant, Synology, and MQTT
I’m using connections to my home network to indicate presence of family members primarily using the Ping (ICMP) integration, but with this method, iPhones frequently “go offline” because they don’t respond to these pings when trying to safe power. The…
ESP8266 ADC Inconsistency Fixed
tl;dr The ESP-12F ADC pin appears to consistently read higher values at times when the processor is not as busy. I worked around this by taking the average of multiple reads, and discarding any averages where the number of samples…
Setting up the $9 Comidox Logic Analyzer
I picked up a $9 Comidox logic analyzer for some ESP8266 work I’m doing, and so far it works great. You really can’t beat the price. Plus, it’s not just for Linux. Here’s how I got it up and running…
$2 DIY Lighting Controller and Door Sensor
I’m rolling my own home security system for pennies on the dollar (and lots and lots of time, but this kind of stuff is fun to me). Here’s what I ended up with for the kitchen. It controls three distinct…
$56 DIY Under Cabinet Lighting
We just remodeled our kitchen. A few months ago we had an electrician come out to give us an idea of what it would cost to add in under-cabinet lighting. Five fixtures came in at about $1,800 with a few…