Yet another teardown post!

Curiosity got the better of me while putting together a BOM for a project and I decided to add one of the new Shelly devices to my order to bump the total over the threshold for a nice discount.

I have not seen a ton of discussion about what’s inside of a any of the new Shelly Pro devices. These ’next generation’ devices appear to all use a common and more uniform API which, apparently, is too demanding of the ESP8266 based hardware so it won’t be backported.

I am trying something new out with this post; some mix of hardware teardown and a brief product review.

Why

I was looking for a way to actuate some heavy blackout curtains.

There have been several DIY projects out there that manipulate curtains but they all appear to be relatively involved as they are often designed for a very specific type of curtain; servos that fit on the ’tilt rod’ or motors that can manipulate the pull chain… etc.

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.