Oh yeah, I’ve got a box of esp32s and mmwave sensors waiting for me to get my soldering iron out. I’m with you, they’re great. I suppose I could somehow figure out out how to do SDR with an ESP32, but I’ve got plenty of unfinished projects waiting for me as it is. ESPHOME makes edge devices so easy to create. And it gives me an excuse to do a little soldering and 3d printing.

The ESP32s are also really good for making old devices smart. One project in my queue is turning a bunch of air purifiers into smart devices that HA controls. They were super cheap and there’s nothing to them but a fan, and a filter but they’re loud. I’m going to make it so they only run when no one is in the room.

I was thinking the same thing. My path was self hosting on old desktops for the longest time then the pi came out and I ended up doing a birdnet project, then home assistant and now I’ve got about a half dozen data collectors on pi zero 2 w machines. They are pretty much set and forget. I use an orange pi for my instance of Solar Assistant because I wanted something that was not affected by anything but the network and the inverter and I know how rock solid these little machines are.

But in the last few years I’ve started embracing docker and NUCs and have pulled apps off Synology, making it just a file server at this point.

So technically I have more raspberry pis than anything else but they are really just edge devices, except for Home Assistant. And it will probably stay that way until there is a good reason to switch. I don’t see that happening for years.

AI Pioneer 🤖

• Fleet: 6–10 devices · 21–50 TB
• Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
• My MVPs: Portainer, Open WebUI, Ollama, Nginx Proxy Manager, arr stack

I’m on solar and batteries. I haven’t had an electricity bill in years.

At some point it will be impossible to buy one that isn’t.

I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?

About ten minutes ago I installed a smart bulb in my fridge. I plan to set up an automation in Home Assistant to tell me when the fridge has been open too long. I also have a temp sensor near the compressor because I had an issue with the fan going out and now if the temp is too high I get an alert to check on it.

I also have a temp sensor in the freezer and the main fridge, again to alert me when things go wrong.

But how else am I going to get on that sweet sweet subscription service for keeping my food cold?

Absolutely. Conservatives need an external enemy to take and maintain power. In the west, a large part of their power comes from the military industrial complex which cannot exist without additional conflict.

Yeah we’re already hearing about people being put in phone booth sized cages. I wonder if the administration will continue to block access after the mid terms.

I think the administration is lying, as usual. They have brains like teenagers and thought, “killing off their families will show them who’s boss and they will cower in fear at our mighty might! And then the people will rise up and revolt against their wounded leaders”. But in fact what actually happened is they gave the extreme right wing in Iran even more control by doing this. The extremists got to say, “I told you they want to destroy our civilization and take our resources” and the people unified and sided with leadership against the foreign invader.