Once I had my baseline AirGradient sensors built and configured, I wanted to add a few more sensors to it. One of the sensors to be added is an SGP30 TVOC sensor (Total Volatile Organic Compounds).
Continue reading “Adding TVOC to the AirGradient”Adding an LPS22 to AirGradient and Building a Custom Sensor in EspHome
I picked up some extra sensors for my AirGradient DIY kits and didn’t realize at the time that they’re not officially supported in EspHome. So with that I went on the journey of adding my own custom sensor code to EspHome to run them.
Continue reading “Adding an LPS22 to AirGradient and Building a Custom Sensor in EspHome”Making the AirGradient DIY
I’ve been working on getting air quality measurements going in and out of my house, however there are a lot of cloud connected sensors out there. I wanted these to be all local, though I wouldn’t mind adding to the public datasets for air quality. I ended up coming to AirGradient as the option that I decided to use, these use all open hardware and can be flashed with the custom AirGradient firmware, or with EspHome. I went the DIY route as well to save some money (and I’ll be customizing them a bit too).
Continue reading “Making the AirGradient DIY”Updating my IOT Devices
Keeping IOT devices up to date is a hard task, since they come in all sorts of different ecosystems, software projects, companies, etc. I run all FOSS IOT devices in order to avoid the problem with proprietary software and companies going out of business. In this, I’ll go over how I’m keeping my 3 types of devices up to date (ESPHome, WLED, and Tasmota).
Continue reading “Updating my IOT Devices”Using IKEA pm2.5 Air Quality Sensors in Home Assistant
I’ve been doing research on making some custom air quality sensors for inside and outside my house. The laser cutter is a main focus point for these as it would be nice to know how it affects air quality (and in the future, maybe activate an air filter based off the sensors readings). When I found out IKEA makes some simple air quality sensors that can be easily hacked using an ESP device, I decided to try it out.
Continue reading “Using IKEA pm2.5 Air Quality Sensors in Home Assistant”Fixing the Unifi MDNS Repeater
I managed to get MDNS working earlier this year to enable my ESPHome projects to avoid having all static IP addresses and let home assistant auto-detect them. However… after some firewall tweaking recently, it all broke. So it was time again to figure out how to get MDNS to work in the Unifi system.
Continue reading “Fixing the Unifi MDNS Repeater”Renaming ESP Devices in ESPHome
I recently started trying out the ESPHome Add-On in home assistant. With this, I was able to add and upgrade some ESP devices, however I soon realized after adding one of them, that the auto-generated name may not be wanted (or if you’re moving a device around and want a new name). So I did some research and worked out the process for renaming the device in ESPHome.
Continue reading “Renaming ESP Devices in ESPHome”Novelkeys Novelty Big Switch Macro Pad
After putting together the EspDeck 9 key pad, and talking to the wife of other places we could make things better, the bedroom fan and lights came up. I mentioned that we could use smart switches for them and make a small 2 key control for our night stands, which she was super excited about, and then I showed her the NovelKeys big switches and it was sold, we were going to have some hilarious macro pads to control our bedroom lights.
Continue reading “Novelkeys Novelty Big Switch Macro Pad”MDNS Across Unifi VLANs
I started working on some hardware projects related to home assistant using the ESP8266. in working on these I learned that the ESP devices use mDNS to advertise their hostnames for communicating with them. My devices however are on a separate VLAN that’s unable to communicate with the internet, and that VLAN was also blocking the mDNS updates from making it through to home assistant, keeping it from being able to know the hostnames. I could use static IPs for this, however I want to avoid locking all my little smart devices to static IPs.
Continue reading “MDNS Across Unifi VLANs”EspDeck Generation 2
When I started into the EspDeck project, I had enough parts on hand to build two units. I had two sampler packs of switches and two ESP8266 boards to use. So once I had the gen1 unit built, I started working on generation 2 of the EspDeck. Gen2 has a well designed case that holds the board in place, allows easier plugging in of USB, and a cleaner wiring design.
Continue reading “EspDeck Generation 2”