The Frigate NVR project is a relatively new entrant to the home security camera DVR space. Like most immature yet popular software, it has a killer feature - very good object detection that just works™ and robust Home Assistant integration.
My beloved coffee maker of 10 years has finally died 😢. Parts are no longer available from either the manufacturer or the second-hand market.
Taking advantage of a (slight) holiday sale discount, I pulled the trigger on a coffee maker that’s designed to be repairable forever. The perpetual serviceability is a side effect of an ultra-simple design; this coffee maker has zero intelligent features which means there’s next to no remote control or customizability.
I love the Sonoff-S31 smart plugs. They’re cheap, well made and - most importantly - trivial to flash with ESPHome and integrate into Home Assistant. They do have one obvious draw back, though; optimized for a “traditional” US style outlet. When you try to deploy them to a power strip, you end up loosing about 50% of the outlets on the strip!
This is how you loose about 50% of the outlets on your power strip.
Yes, there have been loads of people doing similar things! ESPHome already has a tutorial covering exactly this!
I’m writing this up because the approach that I ended up taking was not the intended/planned approach.
I originally pulled the trigger on this particular version because it had a built in screen attached to a micro controller.
I naïvely thought that I’d be able to get a simple UART from the 4 pins next to the microcontroller or maybe even get data directly off of the micro USB port.
Millimeter Wave technology has recently hit “mass consumer product adoption” price points. A casual search for “human presence sensor” on Ali Express will turn up a seemingly endless number of sub $40 devices that can detect movement far more accurately than any old PIR sensor.
Each listing is fairly generic; there’s no explicit manufacturer details but they all use the same marketing images:
As the photos below will show, neither device is super well marked with a model number so I’ll just refer to each by either the color of the enclosure or by the radar sensor inside.
