After a long time without posting, I thought it was about time to get back to sharing some work. I know, insects do not really need solar power and wifi, but as a good landlord to them, I thought it was a good idea. Jokes aside, there is a BME280 and an 18650 battery wired to an ESP32 inside to help me get better weather data. #homeassistant and #esphome made it a real breeze after all the soldering. In the end, I am really happy with the result. Is this #GreenEnergy ?
The other day my wife told me that when I started all this home automation stuff, I would set it up once and never touch it again.
We both had a good laugh.
I know why I married that woman. #homeassistant#homeautomation
I completely lost track of how many days I spent trying to configure #frigate in #homeassistant to get the results I expected. Playing around with a #coral was really fun, and I learned a lot. However, in the end, I decided to go with the #scrypted plugin and #homekit#securevideo. Since I already have HomeKit and the formerly biggest plan for #icloud, I was shocked by how easy it was to integrate. Also, my wife can use it easily, which is a big plus for me. So now that's ticked off the list.
Out of all the things in #HomeAssistant, nothing felt as difficult as getting #Vaultwarden to work the way I think it is supposed to. And it's the same problem as always with Home Assistant: the person sitting in front of the screen not reading #documentation properly. But thanks to the amazing #Hass community, everything works now, and I start to switch from #1Password to #Bitwarden.
I have finished my tomato-moisture sensor for now. Switching from an #ESP8266 to an #ESP32 Lolin made things easier because I don't need to use a clunky power bank, but just a small external battery with a JST plug. However, since I had a free ESP8266, I decided to use it to create an access point and improve the Wi-Fi signal in the area where my tomatoes grow. Since it’s not useful to have the data sent to me all the time, I managed to use #DeepSleep, and now it updates every hour. So much fun!
Sometimes, I feel a little overwhelmed with all the possibilities of #IoT and #HomeAssistant. That is by no means a complaint; I just have trouble prioritizing my projects. Today, I finished my #TDS sensor with an #ESP8266, and it was a lot of fun but also made me want to improve my coding skills faster. Then, I experimented with the #deepsleep feature for my capacitive moisture sensor because I don't need the value every few seconds and plan to use a power bank or something. I love it.
Learning how to solder is kind of fascinating and so much fun. I got a lot of stuff from #AliExpress, and now I feel like a child on Christmas. Besides, I managed to get the capacitive moisture sensor to work and integrated it via #MQTT into #HomeAssistant. Working with electrical power is a bit strange, and I look forward to getting used to it. Those #18650 batteries are a bit scary for a newbie in all the hardware stuff.
Next to do: cloning my 868MHz garage door opener for my wife. Fun stuff!
Back to coding, and I feel very confident about my new projects. I am not sure yet if I'm going to post hardware stuff here. I went back to #python, and I am surprised how much I have already forgotten about it. But it comes back rather quickly. My current projects are:
A capacitive moisture sensor powered by an #esp8266 that is planned to send the data to my #homeassistant and tell me if my tomatoes need water.
A #868mhz transceiver that opens the garage door as soon as my wife comes home.
Python 3.11 is between 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.25x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.
So, after thinking I knew what I was doing (narrator's voice: he absolutely did not know what he was doing), I had to re-setup my entire Mac since I ran into several errors that neither I nor Stack Overflow could solve. And after learning a little bit about version control and GitHub, I hope I can go back to coding now.
Coming back to coding after a long time, I had a beautiful honeymoon in the Netherlands. After that, I started several new projects, most of which involved coding. I was really happy to be doing practical work. Finally, my #MagicMirror is working as I want it to.
Additionally, I decided to switch from #AppleHome to #homeassistant, not knowing what a rabbit hole it would be. But now things are working as I planned. So now, I can go back to coding. I will restart #JavaScript and also #SwiftUI.
After several days of working on my #MagicMirror, which is now working as intended, I went back to day 48 of #100DaysOfCode#WebDev. Today was an introduction to #ExpressJS, and the course is running pretty fast now. I really like it, especially because it allows me to play around more and do more useful things with #JavaScript. But on the other hand, I feel I need to repeat a few course sections.
Day 47 of #100daysofcode was an introduction into #nodejs. So far it seems to be pretty straightforward and I am curious to see what else there is to it. First steps are always relatively easy and light to digest. Which is a good thing for me today.
Day 46 of #100daysofcode is done, and it was more theoretical in nature. Learning about the backend stuff is quite interesting, and I hope to learn a lot more about it. So far, the theory is clear. Let's see if it also works in a real-world scenario.
Day 44 of #100daysofcode#webdev is complete, including the milestone project, and I am exhausted. Some concepts of #JavaScript still baffle me, and I will need to reflect on some of the things the instructor did here. It's the forward-thinking that confuses me because it seems like the code is almost ready in his head before he types it out. Perhaps this is just a form of muscle memory for coding or something similar.
After working on my #smartmirror for two days, I finished day 43 of #100daysofcode#webdev, and I'm afraid I need to review a lot of #JavaScript. Today's task was the game mechanics of the tic-tac-toe game, and I felt lost a lot during the lecture. It's time to repeat some stuff, but that's okay, and I look forward to really understanding the missing parts. https://media.giphy.com/media/TxfiuS0wWx7eyB2fbT/giphy.gif