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.

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Desktop Workstation 2

Its that time to build a new workstation. My current workstation was built in 2013 and while it has been upgraded with additional RAM, SSD storage, and a newer GPU, is still the same CPU and motherboard (that motherboard which now has a dead audio output and a dead NIC). The CPU is starting to show its age with games and processes using more and more of it, and since GPU prices are insane, I’ll be holding off on that upgrade till later.

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EspDeck: Home Assistant Macro Pad

After seeing some posts with EspHome and Zigbee keypads, I realized I wanted to make one too. I wanted the ability to easily trigger more complex actions in home assistant that I don’t have an easy way to fully automate. I decided to make the EspDeck project to provide construction and technical details on building one of these macro pads. EspDeck provides a 9 key macro pad supporting single, double, and hold click actions on every key and can be integrated with home assistant easily through the ESPHome integration or add-on.

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NVR Build

While using MotionEyeOS on a raspberry pi 3 worked for a while, eventually I began to need a bit more hardware to handle some of the security camera goals I had. For this, since I already had my hand crafted 19in rack, I wanted to find a decent rack mount server for it, preferably SuperMicro.

I ended up finding a Redwood Director RDIR-1G on ebay for a good price. After doing some research, it l found out that it was a SuperMicro box, specifically it was a 5018D-MF. This is a solid little 1U half depth box with an E3 server processor on it. The listing claimed it had 32GB of RAM, however I found out later that it only had 8GB ram. This was still a pretty decent deal and I went with it.

Of course, once it arrived whats the first thing we do, open it up.

Initial Look Inside
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