Smart Home

Where the home lab stops being servers and starts being things on walls. Four posts, all from the same stretch of 2021 to 2023 when most of this got built.

The centrepiece is the e-ink dashboard: an Inkplate 10 that wakes every twenty minutes, fetches a JPG rendered from a Home Assistant Lovelace view, draws it and goes back to sleep — a battery that lasts weeks and a display that is legible in daylight. Getting there involved a grayscale JPG the Inkplate quietly refused to render, which turned out to be an encoding problem rather than an image problem.

The other half is sensing: an ESP32 wired to a DHT22, publishing temperature and humidity over MQTT, which worked well and which I took apart again — the post says why, because a build log that only records the successes is not much use to anyone deciding whether to start.

2021–2023 / 4 posts