I’ll likely turn this into something that interfaces with my Home Assistant server to control different devices around my house.
The PyPortal has been sitting on a shelf ever since. Way back in February, it caught my eye, and I picked it up, not remembering what it’s capabilities were. Then I started upgrading IKEA air quality monitors and even made my own. Since I’m at the desk in my office a large portion of the week I thought I would make that 2019 prediction come true.
I could show a bunch of data on the screen and the PyPortal has a touchscreen, so I could display buttons for triggering things around the house. The device also has connectors for doing GPIO, so I got the idea of adding an LED strip, which I could use for notifications. I even had a meter long strip of Adafruit Mini Skinny NeoPixels I had bought in 2017 and never touched that would be perfect. I needed to buy a 2.0mm JST PH Connector kit in order to make a wire that would connect to the pack of the PyPortal. I ended up using a piece of Cat6 cable, even though I only needed 3 of the 8 wires inside.
All of this was done back in March. I quickly began having issues with the ethernet cable and the small JST connectors, so I put this post on pause. Figured it was time to finally fix this before the end of the year. While testing, I determined the LED strip got fried up at some point. It was probably some kind of short from the janky wire.
Here’s what my display looks like.
My favorite aspect of the project and code is being able to publish MQTT messages from Home Assistant, which the PyPortal listens for and reacts to. I can send various commands, such as fill:blue, which turns all of the LEDs blue, or whatever color I set. I have commands to chase a color from one side to the other, bounce a color from left to right and back to the left, pulse the entire strip, animate a rainbow, or set the brightness. Since I don’t have another strip of Neopixels, in order to create a demo video, I wired up a 24 LED circle. You’ll have to imagine the effects on the back of my desk, lighting up the wall.
I can manually send these MQTT messages as shown in the demo, but the real power comes from automations. For example, the LEDs automatically pulse blue when the washing machine is done and pink when the dryer is done.
With the different effects and color combinations, the possibilities are endless. What kind of automations would you run?
Over the years, I’ve seen many versions of a shop air filter, made from box fans and 20×20 inch furnace filters. A few years ago I picked up some old box fans on Facebook Marketplace and bought a pack of filters from Sam’s Club. They’ve been stacked in the corner.
It was finally time to build my air filter. I removed the back covers, feet, handles, and knobs from the fans. I got my first look at the switches inside, which are nearly identical.
I’d easily be able to wire the fans together, so I removed the switches and power cords.
I put together a frame from OSB, cut slots to feed the wires through, and screwed the box fans in.
Then I grabbed wood that had been salvaged from a pallet to construct a door.
On the back side, I used glue and brad nails to attach plywood rails. I also made tabs to hold the filters secure.
I attached the door with a couple hinges and made some notched tabs to hold the door shut.
A plastic screw container was a good side, so I used hot glue to secure the boards and then wired up all of the fan connections.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever use the button, but it allows me to cycle between the three speeds and turn it off. The three LEDs show which speed is currently running. The only thing I got wrong was reversing the low and high speeds, which was a quick fix in the ESPHome code. Speaking of the code, here’s mine.
I used Google Gemini to help and it had a great suggestion to track the run time and add a maintenance reminder when it was time to replace the filters.
In Home Assistant I created some automations. My dust collector uses a smart plug, so when it draws electricity, the air filter automatically turns on at high speed. When the dust collector turns off, the air filter continues to run for 15 minutes before turning off. If I had to remember to turn on the air filter all the time, it would rarely happen, so this is amazing.
I’m still on lifting restrictions for several weeks so Brandi helped me install the air filter on the ceiling.
In our basement we have a baby gate, which surprisingly keeps our cat out of the gym and golf sim areas.
Sometimes we forget to close the gate, so I needed a sensor to monitor its state. I still had the breadboard from the air quality monitor project, so it was quick to add a magnetic door switch and test things out with the D1 Mini clone.
I have extra sensors, so those were kept in the project and allowed me to get rid of the shitty DHT22 I added to the golf remote. Everything worked, but I want to save my last two D1 minis and use them for something with the screens I have for them. So I swapped in an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH ESP8266, which I got with AdaBox 3 or 4 in 2017 and made minor changes to the code.
I figured I might as well use one of the fancy Adafruit Perma-Proto boards I had, which makes soldering all of the connections much easier. As a bonus it was nearly a perfect fit for the case.
The magnetic switch and Si7021 will live outside the box, so those couldn’t get soldered yet. After connecting power I checked the ESPHome logs to make sure everything was working.
I cut holes in a project box, finished soldering, and used hot glue to secure the board..
I reversed the swing of the gate, placed my device, and attached the two sides of the magnetic switch to the gate.
In Home Assistant an automation runs whenever the stairs light is turned off to check the state of the gate. If it’s open, a notification is sent to our phones.
I’m enjoying these little electronics projects, and it feels good to finally put various parts to use.
When playing music I usually change my office MacBook’s sound output to a Sonos speaker, which is an AirPlay device. Sometimes the connection freezes and I have to reset output my default device and back to the office speaker. I wanted to automate both of these processes, so I found an AppleScript as a starting point. I modified it and created an Alfred Workflow with a keyword trigger. Here’s my version of the AppleScript. Feel free to modify it for your own use.
-- This script can be used to set/reset the sound output
-- Two devices because sometimes the AirPlay device loses connection
set myDevices to {"LG UltraFine Display Audio", "Office"}
tell application "System Settings"
-- sometimes it is already open to Sound, which causes an error
quit
delay 0.2
activate
delay 0.2
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Settings"
delay 0.4
set theWindow to first window
delay 0.4
end tell
keystroke "Sound"
delay 0.5
tell application process "System Settings"
tell its group 2 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 3 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window "Sound"
tell its radio button 1 of tab group 1
click
end tell
delay 0.3
tell its scroll area 1
try
set theRows to (every row of outline 1)
on error error_message number error_number
--display dialog "Error: " & the error_number & ": " & the error_message buttons {"OK"} default button 1
end try
repeat with myDevice in myDevices
set device to myDevice as string
set found to false
-- Sometimes the device isn't listed yet, so delay and retry
repeat 10 times
repeat with aRow in theRows
try
if name of static text 1 of group 1 of UI element 1 of aRow is equal to device then
set selected of aRow to true
set found to true
set volume without output muted
set volume output volume 10 --100%
exit repeat
end if
on error
--display dialog "Error setting output sound to " & device
end try
end repeat
if found = true then
exit repeat
end if
delay 0.5
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
quit
end tell
Updated on November 28, 2023 to work with macOS Sonoma 14.1.1.
Updated on March 13, 2024 to retry multiple times if device isn’t listed yet.
Updated on March 21, 2024 to reset volume per device, since the OS remembers the last volume of each device.
Updated on October 8, 2025 to work with MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1.
After building a rack for my workout shoes a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to tackle another thing about the broom closet that has been bugging me for years. It never had a light! I put together a rough video of the entire process.
I’m really happy with how it turned out, especially since I was able to use parts I had in my electronics collection. The whole thing uses a simple circuit, cost less than $10, and doesn’t require WiFi or any fancy connections. The Working of Transistor as a Switch page on Electronics Hub was a big help. I ended up using a PNP transistor in my circuit without resistors because the LEDs were dimming and I wanted maximum brightness.
My garage temp sensor, running home-assistant-temperature-monitor stopped working several months ago. I didn’t have time to figure it out and then summer hit, when it’s not important since I don’t heat up the garage before I workout. This weekend I finally got around to troubleshooting the problem.
Turned out I needed to install Adafruit_Python_GPIO. I must have updated my code at some point without fully testing, otherwise I’m not sure how any of it worked before. I didn’t investigate that though; I was more concerned with fixing it and doing some improvements. I updated the OS and everything on the Raspberry Pi since it hadn’t been turned on in quite some time.
Earlier this year, another Pi on my network, the one running Home Assistant and Pi-hole, ran out of disk space without warning. I’ve wanted to put in a notification system so it never happens again, so I updated home-assistant-pi to report the disk use % to HA. I added an automation to notify me whenever it’s above 90% for one of my Pis. I also reworked all of the automations in home-assistant-pi to make it easier to configure each time I get a new Pi.
That all took much longer than I expected. Most of the trouble was trying to understand the Jinja template system used in HA and where it can be applied to configurations. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it.
While writing this post, I found an old draft with some other updates to home-assistant-pi I never published. Maybe I never finished and that’s why everything stopped working! Here’s a list of some previous updates:
Fixed errors causing program to crash.
It wasn’t reconnecting very well, especially if Home Assistant went away (ex. for a restart after an upgrade). Rewrote how the MQTT connection works.
Switch from PushBullet to iOS notifications.
Changed show/hide Home Assistant group automations.
Now that this stuff is running again and I have a better understanding of the Home Assistant automation capabilities, I need to continue the series of posts I planned on home automation. It’s been five and a half months since I published Part 1!
The Touch Bar on the MacBook is a pain in the ass. I’ve been getting sick of fighting with it to adjust volume and wanted an alternative to using the icon in the Mac OS menu bar. I already had some AppleScript code I use to reset volume to start my work day, so I ran with it to make a simple Alfred Workflow.
I didn’t realize how awesome this workflow would be. I’m using it all the time, even on my other Mac, which has the keyboard volume control buttons.
With all of the Raspberry Pis I have (now up to 6 after adding “flapper”), I wanted to get a bunch of data in Home Assistant (yes, I’m still working on a larger home automation post) and have an easy way to reboot or shutdown each computer.
I wrote a little app which runs as a service on each Pi. Here’s an example of what shows up in Home Assistant.
The Python app and sample Home Assistant configurations are in my home-assistant-pi project on GitHub. Of course it’s all Open Source.
I’ve been working on this project here and there for a few weeks, with most of the early work being experimentation. Everything is now up and running and it’s “deployed to production” so to speak. This was my prototyping setup…
After wiring everything together and repurposing a cardboard box, here is a short video to show the final product.
A few notes on how it works:
The button toggles monitor mode. The LED inside the button indicates if Monitor mode is on/off.
When monitor mode is on and the desired temperature is reached, I get a notification.
I should have shown the knob, but all it does is adjust the LCD’s contrast.
The thing on the top left of the box is the sensor chip for reading temperature and humidity. Originally it was inside the box behind a little window there but it was picking up too much heat from the Pi and LCD in there.
The backlight color of the LCD is based on the measured temperature and updates each time new temperature is read. Anything 32° Farenheit and below is blue, 80° and above is red, and everything in between is based on where it falls within that 32-80 range. As you can see in the example, 48° is a lighter blue. A few degrees warmer and I think it would have started to look more green.
Outside temperature/humidity is pulled in from the Dark Sky data in my Home Assistant setup (which I’ll post about soon).
Really happy with how things turned out. The Pi I wrote this in Python and it’s all available as home-assistant-temperature-monitor on GitHub if you want to make your own or use some of the code for your own project. There is also a list of all the components used.
Here are some pictures I took while assembling the enclosure/box.
Making sure the Pi and attached Hat fit right after drilling the holes. Seemed like there was so much room at this point.
Everything soldered to the HAT. Amazingly I didn’t make any mistakes and everything worked on the first try. A good prototyping setup, having pictures of my final prototype, and keeping a list of where everything connected was invaluable.
The Raspberry Pi, Hat, LCD, USB cables to power and WiFi, and all of the other wiring jammed in! Reaching inside to get things screwed through the box wasn’t easy.
There is a lot more room in the other part of the box where the sensor, button, and knob are. Nice for the WiFi adapter and cable to come across and have some room.
Puck.js looks really cool for automation projects. Essentially these are a DIY version of Flic buttons, but with endless possibilities due to all of the sensors and pins.
Nick Momrik 