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.

A friend recently asked for my help with some reverse engineering. They wanted to know how difficult it would be to re-use some components from a lot of refurbished blood pressure cuffs they had recently acquired.

Sounds easy, right? At a high level, there’s going to be:

• a pump and a pressure sensor and a valve
• a micro controller to run the show
• a way to communicate the readings back to the user

In the interest of expediting things, I asked for the FCC IDs from the devices so I could have a look inside… and was surprized to find out that there was no FCC listing for this particular model from the lot.

This is a super quick “because the official docs didn’t make it super clear so here’s what ended up working for me” post.

After some very disappointing WiFi connectivity issues, I settled on a Zwave based thermostat to replace the Venstar thermostat.

After installing the Honeywell TH6320 and connecting it to the ZwaveJS gateway, a new `climate`` entity appeared in Home Assistant. From there, I was able to see/control:

This is another one of those posts from my never ending quest to integrate Home Assistant with All The Things!

The thermostat that was installed when I moved in was an early Nest thermostat. These thermostats are - for the most part - well reviewed and liked. I had no complaints… except one.

If you’re here just for “how do I get it working with ESPHome” bit, skip to the ESPHome Component section below.

For the last few months, I have been looking for a KVM switch to simplify switching between work and personal computers. Initially, I didn’t think my criteria were that unreasonable, but for whatever reason there is no KVM switch that: