Just another tech blag
The devil is always in the details with large systems like this. I wanted my multi room audio system to feel like a polished product, a professional setup. For that I need to make sure I covered ALL the details, since it’s all the small things that can add up to big issues. Here is a smattering of the details I’ve been working on for my multi room audio system.
Continue reading “Tertiary Parts of an NFC Music Player”
I ran into an odd issue while trying to use a template sensor, home assistant gave me an error that I needed to have a unique id in order to use the sensor. Luckily, this is surprisingly simple to add.
It really is just a one line addition to the yaml for the sensor to add a unique ID. You can also use an online generator to create the ID to make sure conflicts are avoided.
- sensor:
unique_id: asdf
name: a_to_b
I saw this model while looking for some type of laser toy for a cat. It looked neat, integrated with home assistant, and it didn’t require many parts, so I figured why not try and see if my cat would be interested with it.
Continue reading “Catomater”After I built out my two speakers running squeezelite on esp controllers, I ran into some issues when streaming music to them. Sometimes they would stutter, skip, or have other audio playback issues. I knew these weren’t problems with my media files, so it had to be my setup for the speakers.
Continue reading “Additional Squeezelite Stream Stability”I decided to reorganize my home assistant dashboards which culminated in adding a new dashboard and moving a number of views from other dashboards to it. What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t as easy as going into the UI and hitting copy on the view, though it wasn’t hard to do in the end (basically one more step and then hitting copy).
Continue reading “Moving a View between two Home Assistant Dashboards”While attempting to debug a problematic ESP32 recently, I needed to connect to it via the COM port from my PC in order to get more logging from the unit. In attempting to do this, I ran into a very peculiar interaction. I couldn’t connect to the ESP COM port while CURA was open. I guess it was attempting to connect to a 3d printer on the port? Whatever the cause, it was a rather annoying encounter. Once I closed it out, I was able to connect and get the logging I needed.
I’ve been trying to add some BME680 sensors to my IKEA air quality sensors. My goal was to add a bit more environmental sensors around my house to keep track of temperature, humidity, etc. In doing this I also ran into some odd problems with my D1 minis to work through.
Continue reading “BME680 and ESP”
While working on debugging an ESP32, I needed to get the log for the unit when WiFi was down. To do this I need a serial connection, which can be done using putty. Since this was the first time I used putty to connect to a serial device, I figured I’d give a short how to connect to an ESP32 using it.
Continue reading “Putty Serial Connections to ESP Devices”
I run into a case from time to time when I’m developing new automations where they end up hanging and stop responding. Since most of my automations are set to only allow one to run, this ends up causing future calls to it to fail since the hung iteration is still out there.
Continue reading “Finding Stuck Automations”
Ever since I integrated per key LEDs in the NFC Deck, I have wanted to update the ESP Deck design to incorporate them (and update some of my keypads to include them too). I finally got around to both of these, swapping the switches for clear switches on one of my ESP Decks and integrating in the LED lighting.
Continue reading “ESPDeck 3 + LED Backlighting”