I’ve thought more on this yesterday, and I think my issue is-

I don’t want something that ‘just works’, I want to BUILD something that ‘just works’

The distinction is that I don’t want to buy premade solutions. I want to make them. Not because of the customizability, but because the fun is in the building. Think Lego- hundreds of people build the exact same product in the end, but why are they sold in pieces? Just assemble the damn things and sell them complete (with markup). You think more people wanna buy that?? I’d bet against it.

Hard agree. In fact, I think there’s a market for JUST the guides. It’s true that there’s a TON of guides out there already, from old blogs to YouTube, but the issue is: all of them start or end with: “your use case might differ, so perhaps this solution isn’t for you.” Or “make sure this setup is compatible with your specific hardware”

For example: I want to set up some sort of backup/cloud storage type system. Well there’s about 1400 ways to accomplish that. I can easily just grab one and go, but I’ll always wonder- should I have done this a different way? Would my life be easier/more secure if I chose a different set up?

So offering hardware that is compatible with whatever “stack” of services included would be a huge plus. Sorta like getting a raspberry pi and following a specific raspberry pi tutorial- you know the issues you get aren’t gonna be due to incompatibility.

I think it really boils down to the scale of one’s home lab- are you just tinkering to get some skills and make something cool? Or are you hoping to do something much much bigger? Different software solutions fit those extremes differently.

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

Edit: I remember why - I wanted to use a single button dimming option, and as far as I can tell, there wasn’t that option in Shelly natively. There isn’t really a “native” version of this in Tasmota, but someone had already laid out the method to do such a thing with rules and whatnot within the Tasmota console. But after tinkering with it all this morning, I think I busted it beyond repair, so I might give the native Shelly a try!

Mostly because I’m lazy. This device was set up before Shelly made it so easy to run offline versions of the native firmware. And I’ve got a handful of devices already running Tasmota, so I’m just resistant to change.

Yeah, Tasmota has ‘setoption19’ to enable autodiscovery, and I triggered it, and it finds a whole host of SENSORS - but none of them are the switches. It does add one entity which is a single switch. But it seems this just correlates to switch1. I’m thinking it has something to do with how I originally set up the dimmer… it was years ago, so I guess I need to dig into my notes and see if I can figure out what options I set on it before I moved it to it’s current spot.

for reference, the data spit out by Tasmota: {“Time”:“2024-08-29T15:17:19”,“Switch1”:“OFF”,“Switch2”:“OFF”,“ANALOG”:{“Temperature”:35.1},“ENERGY”:{“TotalStartTime”:“2021-07-13T17:05:01”,“Total”:37178.152,“Yesterday”:0.000,“Today”:0.000,“Period”:0,“Power”:0,“ApparentPower”:0,“ReactivePower”:0,“Factor”:1.00,“Voltage”:117,“Current”:0.000},“TempUnit”:“C”}

Ooooh! Finally. I have needed something like this to control the volume on my media PC.

I used to have an automation that detects when my HVAC turns on, and it bumps the volume of whatever I’m playing up a few clicks. Then turns it back down when the HVAC cycle finishes. Super handy due to the crazy loud HVAC in my house.

Yeah, two separate drives. Do you set up bios legacy from the bios menu?

Damn, that would be perfect. I’ll give that a go. Thanks

Interesting… but that just replaces an existing step with another step. I’d like to reduce the overall steps to get to each system. And if I can’t do that, I’d at least like to switch the order to win>EOS>Deb

Perfect. I’m sold.

Thanks

Yeah… the depths of my laziness knows no bounds. But this whole downward spiral of Firefox might be the push I need to get my shit together.

Any reason not to use bitwarden?

I probably need to just take the plunge and start using an actual password manager. Just seems so daunting.

Thanks for the reply.

Can I import all my Firefox saved logins and whatnot on librewolf?

Also: What browser can I use on iOS?

Oh for sure. But they’ve pretty much dictated the development of my yard since.

1600gal pond with massive up flow filtration. 10x8 custom coop with pond integrated to previously mentioned pond Home automation routines to protect and secure the flock and make it easy for friends to care for them while I travel.

But if it rains heavily, ducks will find mud. And they will DRILL! Leaving a massive muddy pit. Luckily I love those dumb birds, and don’t mind the mud.

Yeah, I actually got ducks for eggs soon after I purchased my house. But after getting the little dudes (in the mail) and watching them grow into full sized birds— I was reading and learning as much as I possibly could about how to best care for them. But this sort of research leads you down the path of agriculture literature. And the more I learned, the more it disgusted me. So my birds are full-time pets. I don’t eat their eggs, and I’ve tried to cook them and feed them back to the hens, but they don’t eat them. So now I just give the eggs away to my friends/family so they don’t have to purchase eggs. My logic is that doing this reduces the overall demand for factory farmed eggs.

(I have 4 hens and one drake. They are the most spoiled ducks to walk this earth.)

I am a mighty hunter of the most dangerous game: tofu.

Yup. Learning about animal agriculture was what made me vegan.

Same thing that happens to all the male broilers: meat grinder>dog food.

“Certified humane” doe

Yeah… we’re gonna need a source on that. In my small town there are zero libraries, and about 200 fast food joints. I’ve never lived in a city with more than a few libraries, and those with more than 1 are college towns.

This is an instance where I think the folks at nobu casa (paid branch of home assistant development) could dedicate some resources to hardware. Instead of the prebuilt SBC stuff like HA-blue, or yellow or whatever. Create an esp device that just has a reliable microphone, and crank them out. I’d buy one for every room in my house!

I’ve got an esp army in my greenhouse that runs wLED, and one of them has a mic for doing the sound reactive display stuff, but it’s running wLED, not ESPHome… I wonder how easy it would be to just slap a digital mic on some of the other esp things I’ve got floating around?

Yeah, that might be the case. I’ve never purchased any, so I’m no expert. Wonder why it was used in the fake cheese to begin with.