I’ve been happy with the GE Enbrighten series, though they do require a neutral wire. I use the Z-Wave models, but I can’t imagine the ZigBee models would work any differently.

Neat feature of the Enbrighten line is they recognize several gestures including short tap, long press, double tap, and I think even triple tap. I configured mine so that short taps on/off toggle the lights between off and 100% on, long press on/off brightens/dims, and double tap on activates the preferred evening lighting scene.

I think Minoston are also a GE product line? Again, Z-Wave, but rated for higher wattage in my case. They also require a neutral wire.

I had a pair of no-neutral ZigBee switches sold as ‘Martin Jerry’ brand, but they were super dodgy. Terrible feel to them, and they made a sort of electrical whine when the fixture was on. I pulled them right out and sent them back.

I don’t know this for sure, but if you installed the mobile companion app thru the Store for your platform, then the integration is probably using its push API to reach your device remotely.

I’m >90% sure notification workflows find me even when I am remote and untethered from home when I notify the app on my mobile devices.

Seems It was actually 2024.6.1 that introduced the change. Not sure where in this release notes it said it was a breaking change, but

I’m all turned around. I updated the main post with the link to the PR and I had the right version from the get-go.

Oops! Good eyes, and thanks! Typing yaml on mobile is squinty business. Fixed in the main post

Software problems require software solutions.

//not affiliated, not endorsing

Hot take. Tell me more about me?

Comedy is an art form. You need to commit to the joke.

I have. It usually stays off until they rig the cabin for final approach. Comes back on for landing but hey, whatever?

I’m getting beaten up for my stance here, but seriously: if all it takes to put you over is some midflight ads the do the rest of us a favor and don’t fly. Take a train or whatever.

Y’all are acting like they’re gonna strap us down and tape our eyes open like that Alex Whasisname kid in A Clockwork Orange. I assure you that doesn’t happen for another 22 years in this timeline (give or take).

It’s a contactless carrier, they already have my card on file.

You’ll be in a new city by supper. Who cares what they think?

Dude, you can just turn the screen off. Its OK.

Get a new phone the vendor does support.

Firmware patching is applying low-level firmware to the modem or baseband, similar to a BIOS update on a desktop or server. These binary libraries are (a) proprietary, and (b) opaque to the user (meaning they’re not documented like normal software)

Once a vendor drops support for a platform, that’s it, that’s the end of the line. The device will still work, but any, glitches, firmware vulnerabilities, or updates for network-side changes will no longer be addressed.

My sump pit is pretty shallow, and is dry about half of the time. My challenge is that the sump is on a float switch which doesn’t activate until the water level is just about an inch (15mm) below the bottom of my slab. It doesn’t take much of a delay for it to overflow.

There are three sensor types I’m aware of: a resistive “dipstick,” ultrasonic distance gauge, and a bathymetric depth gauge.

The resistive dipsticks are only about 6in (15cm) in length, and would be good to determine if the water is within that distance of a target water line. I would position it on the side of the pit with the effective upper end set some buffer below the top surface of the slab floor, and possible gram the logic to alert when the water lever rises above the bottom of the slab. I would otherwise be blind to the water level if it is below Tue bottom of to sensor.

The ultrasonic sensor looked interesting, but I have pets and I try to avoid ultrasonics in the environment when I can. It also strikes me as perhaps the least reliable (or most crosstalk-prone) of the sensors because it has a larger field of view, and might be fooled by the equipment in the pit.

That leaves the bathy sensor. Its basically a diaphragm and a pressure sensor you screw to a waterproof housing, and submerge. Placed near the bottom of the pit, it would read the depth of the water by the pressure of the column above it. Most accurate, but also the most expensive. Last I checked, the sensor itself was US$60 on the usual online markets.

Ultimately I’ll probably do a length of copper pipe with a 90 elbow and a cap. I’ll drill and tap a port through the cap and thread and seal the bathy sensor into it, and feed the wire back up the pipe to the controller. I’m not sure if there a driver for it in ESPHome, but if nothing else I expect I can probably just read the analog voltage and alert on a set point.

I haven’t really fleshed it out as a design yet, but that’s what I’m most likely to do.

Either an ESP32 BLE proxy via MQTT with a Tile-like beacon in the backpack, or a cipher lock with a Kid Code are probably the most straightforward solutions.

If you have Frigate NVR set up, there’s a project called Double Take that does facial recognition. Looks like a bit of work and needs training, but it could be a fun project.

Definitely check in with the utility before mucking with the meter. You can find your way into a lot of trouble tampering with active meters. Chances are there’s new meter tech out your utility would install, and of which you could take advantage.

Check this thread. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/smart-water-meter/451935 . You’d install it down flow of your utility meter, and would need ESP32 to read the meter. It’s a bit of work, but if you’re already running ESPHome, it looks pretty straightforward.

On a long shot, you might consider looking into an inexpensively RTL-SDR software radio dongle, and use rtl_433 to scan a few common frequencies the utilities use to scan their meters from the street. I happened to find my neighbor’s electrical meter on a common wireless weather station frequency, and if In were so inclined, could publish it to MQTT for HA to pick up.

Just a couple of ideas. Good luck!

Sure. Think of it like Lego bricks or one of those 1000-in-1 electronics kits. These kits don’t do anything specific, they’re building blocks you use to address a need you have in your home automation vision.

The ESP32 kits are just an ESP32 development board (mine are WROOM boards from Freenove) which has the microprocessor, headers breaking out the IO pins, and a “loader” module that facilities uploading code and is used to power the device with a USB cable. The boards also have onboard WiFi and Bluetooth radios. The -CAM variety has a low profile header to seat a small camera module (included). Look for “Freenove ESP32 WROOM” on your preferred online marketplace.

There are several ways to interact with (program) your ESP32 boards. The easiest and most straightforward is to use the ESPHome add-on in HA from the HACS store, along with the companion integration. The ESPHome add-on provides a software ecosystem of drivers and functions for a laundry list of hardware devices you can use in your project-- sensors, switches, lights, speakers, etc. The ESPHome wiki is sort of a catalog of supported peripherals you can easily use in your build projects. Many times, you can substitute components or extend an existing component driver. Mostly you assemble your components and the controller, and then write some YAML do tell ESPHome what devices are plugged into what pins. ESPHome more or less handles the rest.

The ESP32 integration creates HA devices and entities of the devices and sensors in the ESPHome add-on for use as triggers, conditions or actions in automation.

As for my specific doodads:

PIR is a Passive Infrared Receiver. It monitors its field of view for a change in infrared light (heat) which indicates a “hot.blob” has entered or left its field of view. The model I use, AM312, is designed to signal a change in IR light by raising a signal pin to +3 volts, which has applications in presence detection. It is fast, but not accurate. It also tends to “go blind” when the hot blob stops moving, and can be subject to false positives when the HVAC kicks on or by dappled sunlight

The mmWave radar is a Seeed R60A 60Ghz radar module. This particular module is optimized for human presence detection and fall detection. It uses millimeter wave radar to acquire and track humans in its field of view. 60GHz gives enough resolution to detect heartbeat, respiration and micromkvements like fidgeting. It talks to the ESP32 over the I2C bus (a digital IO bus similar to USB). It has advantages over the PIR sensor because it actively tracks its targets and can even tell if there are multiple people. Its less prone to false positives from environmental changes and smaller animals. Unfortunately, it can take several seconds to acquire a target and begin tracking it. In a presence application, a human could walk across several steps into the field of view within that time, giving the impression of a slow response.

Using both sensors in a presence application is a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach. You can compare the state of both sensors in your automations to determine presence with greater accuracy.

As for learning HA itself: we all started in a similar place not even knowing what we didn’t know yet. You sort of poke and play and build some bad automations. Then you start to research new projects and start to learn what you don’t know yet. That’s OK: its a roadmap to future knowledge.

In my rig, I use HA to solve problems or address nuisance situations around the house. Wife and kids are forever leaving doors open with the HVAC on. I programmed HA to watch the HVAC (ecobee thermostat) and the states of the windows doors. If a door gets left open for more than 10 minutes, HA starts flashing lights as an indicator for someone to check notifications. After 20 minutes of the door/window being open, it turns off the HVAC and sends a push notification to my phone that someone is being a dumbass.

Another one is to shut off the basement lights at 10pm because the kids never remember to after they’re done gaming down there.

Eventually you want to do.more sophisticated things, and that when the rabbit hole gets real deep.

I’ve had an Ender 3 in my cart for months and just can’t quiiite justify pulling that trigger. One of these days, tho… Any day now.

I have two Digi WLED controllers a handful of project kits, myself.

The WLED boards drive some addressable LED strings in my living room and on my patio. They hardly count as “project” kits, but learning about interfacing TTL logic with the LED driver boards was a helpful experience. I learned a lot about the different GPIO uses and modes.

For the project kits I’ve built, I’ve been focused around presence and environment sensors. Using esphome I’ve successfully built PIR (AM312) + mmWave radar module (R60A) presence sensors, natural gas detectors for kitchen and basement utility areas, and a water leak sensor for the laundry area. I had goals of building a 5-in-1 presence sensor, but you can buy products for those now; its a solved problem.

I’ve been considering a design for a sump pit depth gauge because that sounds like useless information that I’d like to have for some reason.

I’ll probably get interested in energy management soon, and will look into current clamps and tracking usage at smart receptacles.

I’m in IT in a healthcare-adjacent sector. Never underestimate the motivation or tenacity of foreign state actors, organized crime and chaotic neutral hacking collectives. You have limited time and budget, and both financial and risk based approval processes to deal with. They have time, ideology¹, and financial incentives.

You can’t win in the face of that.

¹ sometimes it’s hacking for hackings sake, but more typically it’s to disrupt critical services and extort modest capital to go away. Rinse, repeat, make that bank on volume.

I was lucky enough to see Bruce Perens speak at Linux Expo in 1997.

Egads, that was a long time ago. O.o