My day is filled with adhoc and irregular meetings times that aren’t predictable. To coordinate my work life with my wife and family, I setup a Apple Shortcut automation that runs on it’s own every morning, grabbing my Google Calendar events for the day and texting/iMessage’ing the times. To accomplish this, I
Optionally for installation: long micro-usb to usb A cable, 3d printed case, Velcro to stick case to wall
Optional: Setup Apple TV to use IR
Not totally sure what interface the Apple Remote uses, but if looking to Replace Apple TV: you can map the Apple TV to listen to some arbitrary button presses from any unused remote following this doc.
Build an IR Receiver to Capture Codes
First step is to capture all the IR codes. I set up a receiver as follows:
The nice part about this layout for the IR receiver I had is I was able to just slip it into a breadboard, no wiring:
In the ESPHome section of Home Assistant:
Click the big “+” add button in bottom
Fill out the wizard
Once created, edit the module and append to the bottom of the config:
I built a Slack status light because it looked awesome and simple, and at that time I knew nothing about DIY electronics. As I learned more, I outlined how to build a cheaper one on a Raspberry Pi. Then my friend then informed me that you can do it even cheaper with an ESP32 NodeMCU board. He was right. Here’s how I built a IoT busy light for around $5.
I won’t go into the details on the boards, but if unfamiliar it, the tl;dr is you write some C/Lua code using the Ardunio IDE, include WIFI for ESP8266 and Web Server libraries (here’s hello world example code and a great setup video) and add some handlers to toggle the GPIO pins on certain requests, then flash that code onto the board over USB. If never used before, I assure you it’s not as hard or complicated as it may sound or appear. When the board is plugged in, it fires up, the code executes, connecting to WIFI, and this tiny board becomes a server in your local network.
Here’s the wiring I did:
& here’s the code I flashed onto it (note you will need to add your WIFI credentials):
Prototyping a small counting game – pressing a button to count up to 5 with LEDs and on an OLED screen – then celebrating once reached.
My daughter loves to help me build simple circuits, turning LED lights on and off on a breadboard. Not yet grasping her 1-2-3’s or A-B-C’s, I thought building a small game would be an engaging way to get her learning with the things she likes.
I recognize that my last post about a DIY Status Light the project had a total cost over $100 (and that wasn’t evening including SD cards, power supply, shipping & taxes). And that high cost wasn’t for core functionality, it was for aesthetics.
I wondered if I over did it, and how much it would cost and what we be involved, to build a status light for as cheap as possible. I quickly found the answer (from the store I frequent):
Building this out, you’ll notice in the images on this post, I’m using a breadboard instead of the Squid. I did this because I had all the parts of the Squid already from separate kits just not assembled. Note everything in the pictures used is the exact same as the Squid, the Squids just pre-assembled and the cheapest way to get exactly what is needed and nothing more.
Because there is no big led matrix panel, I found a normal phone charger or laptop can be used to power the Pi and light instead of a proper >2 amp power supply. This saved about $5-10.
This is a solder-less approach, so there’s some extra cost in getting the Zero WH instead of just the Zero W and the pre-wired RGB LED, if you know how to solder and have the equipment and can shop around for cheaper parts or cheaper shipping, you may further shave a few bucks off.