Just another tech blag
I have played with the MAX7219 display a few times in the past but never had a solid project in mind for it. With my whole home audio project though, I realized I can use it for a cool little display showing what’s currently playing on the system. I’ll want a slightly larger display to use for a final project, but for now I can play with the automations and back end setup for such a display.
Continue reading “Displaying Currently Playing Music Info”
I’ve had a Bluetooth speaker in my drawer for a few years that is problematic. It doesn’t charge, or turn on consistently, and has other issues as well. Now that I have the ESP audio kit though, I have a need for a good speaker to plug into it. This speaker needing a new control board is just the right candidate for the procedure.
Continue reading “Cramming Smarts into a Bluetooth Speaker”
Since I found the ESP32 audio kit and it’s support for squeezelite, I decided to try making 2 small 3w speakers with it. One of them I’d use an existing speaker as the base and the second I’d custom build. This is my little custom built squeezelite speaker unit with its two built in 3w speakers.
Continue reading “Custom Squeezelite ESP32-A1S Speaker”
I finally came across a speaker setup that I could try out for relatively inexpensively, that also uses open source software, and can be used for multi-room audio. I found the ESP32 A1S audio kit that is supported by squeezelite-esp and has a simple web installer. On top of that, there are a decent number of forum posts using it and providing details on configuration. This gives me a potential holy grail, open source, locally based, multi-room audio speaker. The main problem I will end up having is putting something together with good audio quality, and appliance level ease of use and stability, but thats a future problem, for now, lets check out squeezelite on the ESP32 A1S.
Continue reading “Squeezebox ESP32 Multi-room Audio System”I hooked up my front door lock to my z-wave network recently and wanted to setup some automations around it. One of the automations was to be a notification from home assistant if the lock was unlocked for more than some time period, with two actions on it, one to immediately lock the door, and the other to do nothing.
Continue reading “Actionable Notifications with Home Assistant”I’ve been going down the route of researching and building out infrastructure for a home audio system, and the next stop on this is installing music assistant and checking out some of its features.
Continue reading “Installing Music Assistant on Home Assistant”HACS just released a new major version, with a large redesign using help from the Open Home Foundation. The install process for some major updates can have potential hiccups in it, however this one is very nice and easy to do. This is how I went about installing the update on my home assistant instance along with initial impressions of the new version.
Continue reading “Updating to HACS 2.0”I’ve had an itch for years to get a whole home audio setup working, but I’ve always wanted to avoid the large cloud in the room thats normally there around these systems. I’m finally feeling to start working things out piece by piece to try and build a system intuitive to use and just works™.
Continue reading “Home Audio Plan”
I’ve been using a small 1U server (Running an E3 V2 CPU) to run Blue Iris for a few years now, and in an attempt to find power savings in my electric bill (and subsequent AC savings too) I decided to do some digging for a replacement. I gathered some metrics on the old server and found it using 80-100 watts, so I was aiming to reduce that by 50%. I ended up finding a cute little 2 bay “NAS” online that supports a low power AMD CPU and can handle the HDD space I need for the video recordings.
Continue reading “Upgrading the Network Video Recorder”
I have had XKCD comics in my home assistant dashboard for a while now, but never had the alt text or the title in the dashboard. I wasn’t entirely sure how to get those into the UI in a nice clean way (I’m not very good with the templates yet). I finally found the nice clean way to do it that should be pretty flexible to use in the future too, markdown cards.
Continue reading “Home Assistant Markdown Cards”