Just another tech blag
Smart Home / Home Automation using Home Assistant Primarily
After learning that the original Roomba models have an open serial port with a fully documented API, I just had to try out using it. I pulled the lid off my old Roomba 670, trying not to break any plastic clips and right there it was, the serial port ripe for the hardware hacker. What can it be used for? Just about anything related to driving around the roomba, running the vacuum, and reading sensor data from the robot.
Continue reading “Roomba Brain Surgery”
I picked up a Dreame X40 Ultra with the intent of installing Valetudo on it. Valetudo is an open source project that cuts the vacuums ties to the cloud and allows it to run entirely locally. This means the map of your house remains your own, the camera feeds from the vacuum remain yours, and all other sensor data remains local and isn’t sold to the nearest bidder.
Continue reading “Installing Valetudo on a Dreame X40 Ultra”
Just trying a new thing here I guess, just a gallery of projects, linking out to the blog posts covering them. Not sure if I’ll do this often, probably not though.
I noticed that my roku integrations in home assistant weren’t functioning. They were instead throwing an error that “ECP command not allowed in Limited mode”. Luckily this is a pretty easy thing to fix in Roku settings.
Additional options were added to Settings > System > Advanced System Settings > Control by mobile apps > Network access. This is now defaulted to “Limited mode” which disables the access the integration needs. Putting this setting into “Permissive” or “Enabled” will fix the issue.
As I’ve been doing more soldering and creating air quality sensors, I’ve noticed an extreme drop in quality when I’m soldering. This doesn’t surprise me, but seeing the magnitude of it gives me good reason to work on a small soldering fume extractor and filter.
Continue reading “ESPHome Powered Solder Fume Filtration/Extraction”I’ve been a bit annoyed by the default esphome-web names that many of my devices have. I haven’t tried renaming many of them, which seems to be simpler now than when I first renamed a few of them years ago. I also have a secondary issue in my ESPHome dashboard, devices showing as offline, but that are online in Home Assistant.
Continue reading “Renaming Hostnames in ESPHome”
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”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.