Reference on karl

Dynamic timers in ESPHome

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As much as I love the ESPHome project, there are some features that seem like they’d be essential in an embedded/IoT firmware sdk yet their implementation remain left as an exercise to the user. This post is about one of those “Wait, that’s not built in?! How old is this project?” features: timers.

ESPHome, Timers and You

To be clear, ESPHome does have all of the primitives needed to build basic timers. You can get basic non-blocking pauses in automations with the delay: action.

Using ESPHome with the Treatlife DS03

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Post depreciation notice

This is an update to the Fixing Home Assistant discovery with Tasmota on the Treatlife DS03 post.

Tasmota reliability

A few months ago, I started to notice some bizarre behavior with the DS03 ceiling fan controllers that I had previously flashed with Tasmota. Very regularly, the devices would crash and reboot! I almost never noticed unless I was explicitly looking at the uptime / boot count graphs for the devices but every once in a while, the device would reboot right as I was trying to control it remotely.

Fixing Home Assistant discovery with Tasmota on the Treatlife DS03

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update

This post is now deprecated. It has been superseded by Using ESPHome with the Treatlife DS03 from 2022-06.

UPDATE: (2021-10-22): Tasmota 9.5.0 has been superseded by the new Tasmota 10.0.0 release. This release works perfectly with the rules/automation outlined below; you no longer need to avoid the problematic 9.5 release with the DS03. I am extremely grateful to every one of the people that contributes to the Tasmota project to keep it improving!

Two Tasmota rules

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tasmota is an incredibly powerful alternative/open source firmware for the ever popular Espressif family of WiFi equipped microcontrollers. This does not need to be another post espousing it’s many awesome qualities, so just trust me on this; Tasmota is AWESOME.

Tasmota supports user configurable rules which are simple commands wired into various device triggers. In short; a device running Tasmota gains some autonomy to react to events without needing to report the event to, and wait for commands from, a remote server.

Systemd Resolved With Consul Agent

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I pieced this technique together a while back and created a gist for it. I’m creating this post as a pointer to that gist so I have something that’s a bit easier to reference and refer others to.

And i want to test out the hugo shortcode for embedding a gist :smirk:.

The really short version:

Create a dedicated interface that can only be accessed from the local system
Bind the consul-agent’s DNS service to this local only interface
Tell systemd-resolved that all hostnames with the .consul TLD can be resolved via a DNS server on this local interface

No need to disable resolved and replace it with dnsmasq :smile: