New Year, new goals

I’ve had this domain for several years now and I’ve never done anything with it. Since I have some downtime at work, I’ve decided to start keeping track of what I’m doing both professionally and personally. This may be projects in the office, weight loss ideas, side-hustles, or anything else that comes to my mind. So lets start.

Several years ago I wanted to have a smarter house. I had a couple of cheap windows sensors that I wanted to integrate into something. I sue them because it gets hot in my apartment and I wanted to be able to see if I had left a window open when I went to work. The sensors I had …worked to a degree but they had different apps on my phone and were temperamental since they were connected using wifi.

After doing some reading, I moved over to a different kind of sensor, ones based on the Zigbee standard and for the most part those have been rock-solid. So I expanded the ones I had. I added two temperature sensors, one in my bedroom and one outside so that I could see when it was cooler outside than in so I could open up the windows and get fresh air. Those have been great other than they eat coin batteries semi fast.

Last month I installed a Ratgdo garage door controller that ties into my existing system. Finally I can control and monitor my homes garage door from a remote location. No more wondering if the door is open while I’m driving to work.

And last night, I modded a couple of IKEA air quality sensors to tie a ESP8266 into them so I can see the air quality inside my home. Is this useful? Not really, since the air quality is terrible in my area, but more of getting me into tinkering again.

All of this is tied into a Home Assistant instance I have running on an older SFF PC in my office. Again, is this useful? Somewhat, but it is nice adding on sensors and devices to keep an eye on things. Is anyone watching Plex, I can check. How much electricity am I using? Same thing.