Just another tech blag
I have a number of old projects I started years ago and never got around to finishing. Some of these have electronics in the plans, others are just 3d prints. Many of them I purchased parts for, or printed parts of them, but I just never managed to finish them. So I plan on getting them done, cutting a few corners to do so, but it’s better than not doing them at all.
Continue reading “Finishing Old Projects 1 – Adafruit Gas Mask”
I made a single acrylic sign for myself and as a test piece before I started making 5 of them for Christmas presents. Now that I’ve finished those 5, I have a few lessons that I learned along the way that my original sign didn’t shake out of my design and method.
Continue reading “Lessons from making 5 side lit signs”
Now that I have a CO2 laser available, it opens up some new things that I can do, like cutting and engraving clear acrylic. Adding some side lighting to that and we can make a pretty sweet sign. I also plan on making a few more of these for gifts, so this first one is my experiment piece to try out all the techniques needed.
Continue reading “Making LED Acrylic Signs”I do small experiments from time to time to try out features or functionality before building them into a project (or project design even). In this case I wanted to try out the IR functionality in WLED for a project that may not have WiFi for access to the full fledged WLED feature set.
Continue reading “IR Remote with WLED”
I found out recently about the webpage card in home assistant and how it can be used to add a WLED live view to your home assistant dashboard. Not only that, but its pretty simple to do as well!
Continue reading “Adding WLED Previews to Home Assistant Dashboards”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”I have a laser cutter in my office that I use from time to time. I close the door when its running because you need safety glasses on while its running, but since I use my office for other things, the door closed doesn’t necessarily mean safety glasses are needed. To make this simpler, I decided to try and make some automations to notify when the laser is running. I want to use a WLED strip around the door and light it different colors based on laser operating status (and other statuses in the future).
I was able to get WLED going on a light strip but I do have a lack of ideas on how to make use of it. I finally decided to go with the tried and true movie lighting. So my goal is to setup automations so that when my Roku begins playing something, the WLED strip dims and sets to a specific color (we’ll go with red), and when I pause or stop playing, it will turn to max brightness white light. This will give lower lighting while watching and brighter lights if something is paused (and I have to go get something). I’m still not entirely sure if I will end up making use of this in the end, but it will give me some ideas on what I can do and how to do it.
Continue reading “WLED Automation for Roku in Home Assistant”Integrating WLED into Home Assistant is a relatively simple task.
After the, you’re good to go. Home Assistant will show the unit as a number of entities, a light and a number of switches.
I found a guide for running WLED on an ESP8266 micro controller to drive individually addressable RGB cables. I thought this would be a fun little project after working with the smart plugs and home assistant automations. Since WLED is another FOSS and cloud-free project, this still fits with my whole fully self hosted smart home ideal. Since no project is fool proof and I have run into small problems when working on the project.
Continue reading “WLED with ESP8266”