If you have to open it up, then you can at least allow-list IP addresses through your firewall so it’s not everyone who gets full access.

was this today? I also need half an hour or so to get going on a friday.

Tuya devices are super cheap, often sold as massive loss leaders and frequently rebadged as other brands (MOES comes to mind, as well as lots of “iThing” type brands)

It is not surprising at all that lots of folks eschew the mobile app and use HA to control them. Also the Local Tuya integration is difficult to use and often doesn’t work at all.

There’s also this cool Zigbee IR blaster device that can learn the IR codes and then fire them out from HA if you don’t have the stomach for ESPHome.

I bought an LG commercial display, which was roughly double the cost of an equivalent LG TV.

It’s awesome, it has 2x HDMI inputs and no smart features at all. It is supposed to go in video walls (big arrays of tiled TVs) so don’t need all that AI stuff.

Control is via RS232, so I soldered a connector onto an ESP-32 and installed ESPHome on it to control power, volume and screen.

A soundbar isn’t quite right for me, but again I would recommend something with RS232 and use an ESP-32 (if you like hacking) or a commercial rs232 to ethernet adapter (like this) if you don’t.

DPO here. Under GDPR (the european data privacy regulation), there are a number of “legal basis” definitions for why a company would process your data. The strongest bases are the performance of a contract or a regulatory requirement, and at the other end of the spectrum, a company can process your data if you consent for them to do so.

There is a “middle” category of legal basis which is “legitimate interest,” which is for companies to process your data because it is their line of business to do so, or it is part of a reasonable business process to do so. Marketing is an example. So if you post on Reddit about a positive experience you have had with a manufacturer of PC component, that manufacturer might scrape your blog post, and add you to their CRM. They might know your email address from your LinkedIn, and they could associate that with your buying activity for example, to put you in a specific category of customer.

These GDPR popups give you the perception that you can opt out of “legitimate interest” processing, when the reality is that there is no such right afforded to you under GDPR. Therefore the site is either relying on your consent but dressing it up as legitimate interest, or they are just wrong and using the wrong terminology.

I use the Hive integration and just let the Hive stuff do its work, monitoring via Home Assistant occasionally. My setup is the Hive thermostat, boiler relay and the hub

I went down a rabbit hole of TRVs, automations, Shelly relays talking to the boiler, zigbee thermometers everywhere, and it got complicated. Ultimately the big risk was the system getting stuck or in a state where the boiler would be on all the time and cost a fortune, so I got rid of it all.

If Hive no longer meets my needs I know I can just pair the hardware to my zigbee network and stop using the cloud service.

beneath a steel sky vibes

local control via wifi or zigbee, nothing that connects to the internet.

there’s a good tutorial to host ollama and a vector database here

Have a look at the LinkedGo wall thermostats. They have Shelly chips inside so rock solid and great compatibility with HA.

maybe just a window/door sensor that uses a magnet to detect closure?

Apollo Automation

The next town over from me has a car/van manufacturing plant. I went there as a teenager to learn about Kaizen, lean, process mapping and critical path analysis.

As an adult I know of a few families who have booked to go to watch robots make cars, see the assembly line and gawk at the massive diagrams on the walls.

Tor operator here.

If you don’t have a second IP for your relay, don’t host at home. You will have CAPTCHAs everywhere, many sites will block you and your ISP will eventually contact you to stop degrading their IP space reputation.

Most website owners don’t discriminate between Tor exits and relays. They subscribe to block-lists that include all known Tor IP addresses. Major online services will make your browsing experience really shitty and once you’re a “known Tor IP” it will take months to remove that reputation.

You can run a Bridge instead, but you will eventually have the same problem.

I use Shelly EMs and EM Pros and they are excellent. My favourite feature is that they work on non-networked firewalled VLANs and don’t need the internet to work.

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I’ve got two of the Screek 2A sensors and think they’re good. Mmwave technology isn’t a magic bullet that automatically works every time, like all radio tech there are some limitations.

I use one to turn on a light in a hallway and the other to detect when someone approaches the front door and issue an alert via ntfy.sh. Once in a while it misses some motion, so I’d probably not recommend it if you were building a human life kind of scenario, but they’re fine for me.

More importantly, they’re well supported by HA/ESPHome, open source, inexpensive and compact.

how do you typically notice the filter needs to be changed now? does it:

• draw more power than usual? wattage sensor
• give some alert like a “change filter” light? esp32
• need changing after a certain time/usage amount? power consumption sensor
• need changing every X days? you might just need a calendar alert

of course the mega nerd approach would be to put a particulate sensor in the duct like a PMS7003 that measures PM10 particles like dust, strap on an esp32 and set some alerts using your favourite monitoring tool.

You can always use the Home Assistant API to create your own UI experience. I create small HA touch panels using M5Stack Core2 devices this way.