Surfacing the right information at the right time in the right place is a difficult but essential task for any credible automation system.

I have been experimenting with the concept of a Home Assistant powered KDS for a few years now and have found that the refrigerator happens to be an especially good place to surface some information and device controls.

If you somehow missed it, one of the certificates used by Lets Encrypt chain of trust expired this week. As expected, things broke…. including my private, filtered DNS over TLS server - SkyHole. Below is a condensed form of my notes to create the exact document that I wish I had while trying to triage broken DNS on my phone.

TL;DR: Implement solution 3 from this post.

EDIT: (2021-09-19): After some back and forth with /u/Laxarus, there is now a simpler method! The snmp platform still does not support setting device_class, but wrapping the sensor in another template sensor is not required; just do so in your customize.yaml. I have called this out below.

This is another quick “here’s how I did it, hope this help” post.

In preparation for the inevitable grid brownouts that summer 2021 would bring, I installed a rather beefy UPS for my home network / lab. After some browsing, I discovered a local eWaste liquidator with a really good deal on some second-hand APC UPSs.

UPDATE: (2021-10-22): Tasmota 9.5.0 has been superseded by the new Tasmota 10.0.0 release.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!

Stack/signal lights are everywhere in industrial applications for good reason: they’re a compact and relatively information-dense indicator system. They always seemed like the kind of indicator that only people with expensive machines needed. Until I found that they can be had for just under $6/light from Ali Express, that is.