Inside the Pulse-Eight HDMI CEC Injector

To make a long store short, Google recently pushed a few updates to my TV that made it slow as all hell and frustratingly unusable. I finally got fed up with the laggy UI and dug out an old mini PC and installed LibreELEC on it.

Everything worked perfectly except for the lack of CEC support on the mini PC.

This is a common enough problem that there’s a few different devices out there that can add CEC support to a device that doesn’t have it. I chose the Pulse-Eight HDMI CEC Injector because it’s natively supported by LibreELEC.

ESPHome for Sonoff T5 family of Switches

It’s hard to beat Sonoff switches when it comes to well-made, affordable, Home Assistant compatible switches. Ever since they announced the T5 series, I’ve been patiently waiting for the US variant to become available so I could replace my M5 switches with T5 switches.

Don’t get me wrong, the M5 switches are great… but not perfect.

The T5 switches improve on the M5 limitations with some new and novel hardware features. Taking advantage of these unique features requires a considerably more complex ESPHome configuration than the M5 series switches.

Yeelight Light Bar Pro (YLTD003) Teardown

Monitor-top light bars are wonderful for reducing eye strain and fatigue and the effect is even better with a bias light behind the monitor. Enter the Yeelight Light Bar Pro (YLTD003).

Quick peek inside the EL029F3WRA

In light of the recent news that the OpenEPaperLink firmware has been ported to the nRF52811 series of chips, I decided to take a look inside the Solum EL029F3WRA to see if it was a viable candidate for a project.

As it turns out, it is very similar to the 2.9 inch tags. I hope to soon have a simple CAD model of the ESL which I’ll use to model a basic pogo-pin programming jig for this particular ESL.

Roborock S8 teardown

I recently acquired the new S8 from Roborock to replace my rapidly failing roomba.

While I am patiently waiting for Dennis and Hypfer to add Valetudo support, I thought I’d have a peek inside to see if this model will be any more serviceable or maintainable than my current vacuum.

From what I’m told, the S7 and the S8 are supposed to be pretty similar so here’s to hoping that it’s not too much more of a wait.