Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266, 3D Printing, and other Technology
I saw a Reddit post recently about the eRank feature that maps your orders. However, it only does the last 300 orders. Here’s how to map every order. This should just take you 5 minutes. If you find this useful please click the links to the right when you buy on Amazon to help pay for this hosting.
Update: It looks like the latest Formbot kit does come with a BTT Pi, and Stealthburner. That’s good, but it’s still lacking CANBUS and TAP, and you have to get your own 3d printed parts and still costs more.
This is my Magic Phoenix Voron 2.4 Build Log, which will be my 7th 3D printer. I started with a Creality Ender 5, and then got 4 Corexy printers, which were all Creativity Elf, and then I got the Voron 2.4 R2 from Formbot. These Vorons will start replacing the Elf printers. The Formbot kit has been great, except for the constant breaking of wires in the cable chains, which is why I switched that one to umbilical.
I wanted a way to be able to easily monitor my 6 3D printers. I thought about mounting a monitor, and just displaying a webpage, but I figured this would give me a much cleaner look on my wall. From the animation above, you can see that one printer is completely off(bottom left), one printer just completed a print, and the bed is about 3/4 of the way to fully cooled(top right), one printer is paused, likely due to filament running out(top left), and the other 3 are currently printing.
It’s been a while since I have posted, but someone on Reddit asked me about my Android widget that shows information from my 3D printers. This will be a quick write up to point you in the right direction, so I won’t have step by step instructions. Keep in mind that this only works when your phone can actually connect to Moonraker. So if you are away from home, it won’t work unless you have a VPN.
So I started an Etsy shop selling 3D prints of my designs almost a year ago, and there have been times when an item runs out of stock on Etsy. When that happens, the item becomes unlisted until I update the inventory. As far as I can tell, and after asking around, there doesn’t seem to be a way to have Etsy notify me when that happens and it’s a hassle to go in and update the inventory with every batch I print. I also thought about setting the inventory to a really high number, but then I don’t want to end up in a situation where I get a ton of orders all at once and can’t keep up.
I recently saw this on Amazon and figured I could print that. I’ve also been wondering about embedding an object into the middle of a 3D print, so I figured this would be a good project. So I bought these blades, and measured them, and started working in Fusion 360. In hindsight, I think that some jigsaw blades would have been easier when modeling since there aren’t any weird angles to deal with. Either way, it wasn’t too difficult.
Note: This printer is pretty much the same as the Creativity Elf (AliExpress) and Sapphire Plus, so if you are searching for any details about this printer, searching for the Elf or Sapphire might be useful as well. I think there might be slight differences though. The frame is a different color, and the Coreception comes with LED lighting, which the ELF doesn’t appear to have.
After a few months of owing my first 3D printer, I wrote a blog post talking about things that I wish I knew when I first got it. It’s now a year later, and I’ve learned a lot since then, so I figured I would share that.
Set your expectations on quality
I wasn’t planning on writing a post on this, but after I spent 4 hours wrapping my head around this and getting it working, I’m hoping this information might be able to help someone else. A while ago, I purchased this TP-Link 3-Way Smart Switch 2-Pack. I purchased them because the TP-Link stuff seems to be reliable, inexpensive, and it works with HomeAssistant. As an added bonus, you CAN use the smart switch on only one side of the circuit, and keep a dumb switch on the other side. You can turn the light on from either end, and the TP-Link will always show the correct status of the light. This allows you to make your 3-way switches smart for a good price since it always comes with a pair of 3-way switches. I wanted to be able to have the light turn on automatically using the Wyze Sense door sensor and a routine via Alexa.
A while ago, I wrote about installing a smart thermostat followed by a post about pairing them with Home Assistant with a Z-Wave Stick. I didn’t get a chance to mess with it much that summer and I only used it as a dumb thermostat. However, last summer, 2019, I decided to see if I could save a little money by optimizing my cooling schedule. This post talks about the steps I took to do that.