Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266, 3D Printing, and other Technology
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.
So I’m seeing a lot of posts on Reddit and other places about people wanting to compile Marlin and having a tough time with, or more commonly, many people just aren’t doing it because it seems intimidating. I’m hoping to put together a walkthrough that simplifies the process as much as possible for people that aren’t really comfortable compiling something. Many people think you need to be a programmer to do it. You don’t.
So I had some old LED strips that were hooked up around the window frame in my kid's room which were not doing anything because the old WiFi controller I had on it was just so flaky and it connected via the cloud to, I'm assuming, China. I revisited getting it working, and it turned out that it was using an ESP12 chip. So I figured I should get that going with ESPHome (Check out my previous article about ESPHome) to give me total local control with Home Assistant.
For a few months now, I've been looking for a way to upload videos from OctoPrint (This link is to my previous write-up on OctoPrint and its plugins. Please check it out.) to YouTube automatically. I was optimistic when I learned about the OctoPrint-Dropbox-Timelapse plugin, and Zapier, I was optimistic that they would be able to do what I wanted. However, I was not able to get it working. But the OctoPrint-Dropbox plugin had a recent update, and all of a sudden, it all just started working. So I figured there might be others that wanted this, so i did a write-up on it.