Automating Blinds with a Retrofitted External Motor

It’d be a real stretch to say I needed to automate the blinds in my apartment, but it was fun, and I’m loving the result. Blinds open automatically at sunrise and close at sundown. It’s nice to wake up to the sun! I designed most of this setup myself, and wanted to share how I […]

Rescue Your Amazon Dash Buttons

Earlier this year, Amazon announced that they’ll discontinue Dash Buttons. I don’t know how successful Dash Buttons were for their intended use, but Home Automation hackers have loved (mis-)using them for everything from warming up their coffee pot to keeping track of bodily functions. Unfortunately for us hackers, Amazon is an unforgiving god. Not only […]

Webpack with Arduino and PlatformIO

Web development for embedded devices sucks. More often than not, it involves editing concatenated strings in a header file. Even some of the most popular web projects like Tasmota, WiFiManager, and esphome work like this. If you’ve done any web development recently, it’s probably involved build tooling like Webpack. This makes it super easy to […]