| ▲ | scottlamb 2 hours ago | |
> The rest of this blog post is a walkthrough of a software engineer’s approach to home automation and building custom hardware, and let me tell you: both the final product, and the journey to get there, are hella jank. IMHO it's not that bad? With the disclaimer that I'm also a software engineer who dabbles very very lightly with electronics and has no mechanical engineering expertise. But the overall approach of doing this by stepper motor seems quite defensible given the security deposit constraint. The only part that seems really janky to me is that it's not physically held in place that well as noted in this paragraph: > Ultimately, the biggest issue is that binder clips and cardboard aren’t quite as robust of a mounting mechanism as I’d hoped they’d be… and over time, the stepper motor tends to “sag” a bit, resulting in a bit too much friction between the motor, the coupler, and the underlying knob, causing the mechanism to stall out until someone manually goes and reseats it… Involving MQTT and HA can sometimes get frustrating too; having your AC not working properly if there's a problem on a Linux machine can suck. If this becomes a problem in practice, iirc ESPHome also has a thermostat component, and temperature sensors are really cheap and easy to wire in, so you could do it all on the microcontroller pretty easily in a low-code way. But if this part is working, no need to mess with it. | ||
| ▲ | barnas2 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |
That's what I did. Just an esp32 relay board with a tiny screen and a knob. Then I put more esp32 sensors in each room to get individual temps, with HA logic to select which room the thermostat pays attention to. If HA dies for some reason it falls back to a local control and I'm back to the same situation as before, a thermostat that only pays attention to the temperature in the hallway it's installed in. All the boards were flashed with ESPHome. | ||
| ▲ | danudey 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | |
It does feel hella jank, but it's pretty obvious from the tone of the text that the author is fully aware of that. He went through every available option in order from reasonable to jank and this is the first one that worked. There's nothing wrong with jank as long as it's not going to burn your house down the way some of his other rejected ideas would have. | ||