For the longest time, I had a dedicated raspberry pi with a GPS module acting as the ntp server for my home network. I chose to use a dedicated host for this because my router - at the time - did not have a serial port that I could leverage.

Background

Long story made very short: the amplifier inside my ancient 2.1 desktop speakers died and I couldn’t find anything “off the shelf” that would serve as a suitable replacement and integrate well with Home Assistant.

So if you can’t buy it, you have to build it! And as it turns out, there’s a whole community of audiophiles that have published designs on all the usual places you’d find free designs for makers. Similarly, there’s a few companies that seems to specialize in audio electronics aimed specifically at people that are building their own speaker systems and just want someone else to handle the electronics and software.

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.

What

Hidrate Spark bottles are one of a small but growing number of ‘smart’ water bottles. In this instance, ‘smart’ refers to some mechanism for reporting on and tracking the bottles content over time.

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.