Well, we're back! A smaller update this week (fortnight? month?). Once again, I appreciate all the support people have given me. It's really helped. Right now, I'm in 'keeping the lights on' mode, so even the small donations can mean a day or two more of electricity. Sure, I'm struggling a lot, but at least it can't get worse!
Reader, I got Covid.
So, most of the past few weeks I've been feeling either slightly off, or completely free of sickness, so please bare with me while I work through this.
Here's a brief rundown of what I've done since the last blog post:
I made our bedroom TV "smart"
Back in 2016 or so, my mum gave me her old bedframe, it's a king sized bed, with a particularly silly gimmick. There's a button on the side that makes a TV pop up out of the footboard. The TV is old and scratched, but it would be awkward to replace and it does the job for the few times I do watch TV in bed. It's actually been really useful while sick!
Due to its age, the buttons are a little worn and don't always work. They likely need cleaning but the whole unit is glued together and disassembling the area I sleep in is a much larger project that I don't want to take on right now.
However, the buttons to activate the TV Motor are attached via standard RCA connectors. Bridge the two together and the motor activates causing the TV to pop out of the footboard! It's a very simple design.
This made me wonder, could I integrate this into Home Assistant somehow?
A while back, I got a Raspberry Pi Pico W because they were cheap and I knew I'd have a use for it someday. These can run ESPHome (Well, my specific model can). And so, it was a simple matter of flashing the device, printing an enclosure and soldering an RCA connector to some GPIO pins. I soldered a standard 3.5mm female connector and used an adapter and splitter to ensure the buttons could still work also.
Unfortunately, in all my excitement, I completely forgot to document this for the blog! I really wasn't thinking. But if some people are interested I can disassemble it and take some photos. I haven't soldered something that small in quite some time so I was happy it worked first try! It still works well 2 weeks later.
I also 3D printed a small box for it to fit in, adding a cutout to an existing Raspberry pi Pico W box I found online. I have unfortunately lost the original files and only have the GCode for my printer remaining.
For Home Assistant integration, it simply sets the GPIO pin high for half a second and then returns to zero. The bed itself does not report whether the TV is up or down, which is a shame, but it is enough that I can activate the motor via voice command or via my phone.
You can view the relevant section of my ESPHome Yaml file here
Experimented with some bluetooth presence sensing
With a newfound confidence in ESPHome, I decided to repurpose some ESP32 devices I had lying around as bluetooth proxies in Home Assistant. The ESP32 is a really powerful chip as I'm finding out! Such a tiny device, but with wireless capabilities and a large variety of IO options.
I installed Bermuda on my Home Assistant Instance, and hooked it up. As my Home Assistant server already had a dongle, it did interfere with a while (reporting inconsistent distance data), but using ESPHome as bluetooth proxies solved my need for bluetooth even better than having a hardware dongle plugged in. Even if I do abandon this project later, I'll likely keep an ESPHome device around as a proxy simply because it's more reliable than using a dongle direct with the server. I have a few BLE devices like my Xiomi smart scales that I like to keep hooked into Home Assistant.
Bermuda is fairly simple to set up, however it does require finding your IRK for some devices (such as my iPhone). A quick trip to the keychain app on my mac and we're up and running!
Unfortunately, the areas aren't very 'sticky' and the device wanders between rooms even when still. You can see this as I've been in the office (orange) for the past few hours, but it's still occasionally shown me as being in the Living Room or Bedroom, where the two other devices are.This is likely something that can be solved with some calibration and tweaking, and having more than 3 devices would help (ideally one for each room!). However, it's still pretty neat that Home Assistant can now have a good guess as to which room I'm in. If I manage to make it reliable I could set up some really neat automations around it.
Made some keychains
I made some of my Final Fantasy 14 Keychains for someone! They're laser cut and hand painted. This was my first time engraving too, which took a few attempts. I'm not showing the engraving themselves for privacy reasons. Of course, due to being sick, I've not actually shipped them out yet, but that should be happening this week as I start to feel better.
These designs were a collaboration with someone and I'm really pleased with how the turn out every time. If you want some for yourself, please get in touch!
Replaced office Lights
Honestly this is a small one that I just wanted to mention. I spoke earlier about using Home Assistant for some basic home automation. A lot of our lights are zigbee or wifi bulbs, which we've slowly migrated to over the 4 years of living here. Unfortunately, the cheaper LED bulbs do tend to burn out, and the ones in the office both had some defective capacitors (by my guess), and so would flicker at the highest brightness, as well as being generally dimmer than expected most of the time.
Thankfully, last time I bought bulbs, I got some spares, exactly the amount I needed now in fact! The office is now a much brighter (and less flickery) place to be.
If anyone reading this is considering 'smart home' stuff, please get zigbee equipment. Wifi bulbs have been so much more trouble, and zigbee networks tend to be more reliable in my experience, especially as you add more devices to the mesh.
Started Ludum Dare 56
This one is a little sad. I started, then gave up on the most recent Ludum Dare. Ludum Dare is a game jam competition where you make a game in 48 or 72 hours. At one point in my life I would do every Ludum Dare without fail, but that stopped once life go too busy. I was hoping to make a Visual Novel for this one, with my boyfriend doing the art.We got some art out there, and I began writing a VN system in Godot.
I used the Dialogue Nodes addon as a base, rewriting some of the code and adding to it to allow for multiple characters speaking, as well as overhauling the 'portraits' system to use a referenced Texture that can be placed independently (with the goal of eventually adding some animation effects). You can view my changes in this fork.
Unfortunately I realised with me still bieng sick, it's unreasonable to expect this level of crunch at a game jam for myself, and I should focus on getting better. I am still interested in the idea and might take it further in the future still though!
This was my first time with Godot and GDScript. I found it really easy to pick up and lovely to work with. I'll definitely be revisiting the platform at some point.
Media recommendations
Finally, some media recommendations.
I recently(ish) started rewatching Firefly with my partners. 2 of them have never seen the show, so it's a great opportunity to introduce them to a classic. I'm honestly shocked when rewatching it. There's a definite difference in how it's written and shot compared to modern TV, and I think for the better? The world feels so much more fleshed out than modern shows, and the self contained episodic format (while still telling a deeper, ongoing story) is lovely. I just want to binge the whole thing again, but we're taking our time with it. Especially as one of my partners is 6 hours behind me in timezones.
In return, my boyfriend finally has my watching Gravity Falls, which I'm also really enjoying! It's not a surprise as it's been on my radar for a while. It's a comfy simple kids show, but I can see it getting really in-depth with its own lore.
That's all for now. I'm going to focus on getting well again and hopefully having some more interesting things to share in the next few weeks. Tata for now!!
I'm so glad I got footage of this!
ko-fi decided to delete my whole post. So here's a brief on how I managed to recover it.
As you can see. As soon as I clicked ''publish" I was greated with a simple JSON error stating a title is required for my post. It had a title! I checked!
I won't lie and say I put hours and hours of effort into this post. I'm sick and really just wanted to update you all, but it has taken over an hour of work (now two!) and it was quite a blow to see all that work disappear when I'm already down on my luck.Gratefully, I run an NVIDIA card, and I have it record the last 20 minutes of my desktop. I at least could recover the latter half of my post!Going through the footage, right before clicking publish I scroll to the top of the page. I will quite often use Page Up/ Page Down or Home / End to navigate, but for some reason this time I used my mouse! It saved me, as I could advance frame-by-frame through the scroll and capture most of my writing. Some sections were lost due to the scroll being too fast to capture. However, the sections lost were less than 20 minutes old so I had footage of myself writing them. If Nvidia want to sponsor my next post I will sing your praises forever. This really saved my ass today!
I painfully have rewritten this entire thing from my screencaps of the video, so please excuse if there's any mistakes or errors. Right now, I just want to get this thing out!
Of course, I have learned my lesson and future posts will be written in Obsidian (My preferred writing and note taking tool), and ported over to Ko‑fi at the end, as well as frequent drafts saved.
This also sparked my interest in replacing my existing blogging platform so I can write my posts here as a backup and use ko-fi for exclusive posts (as well as crossposting)