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?
I just hooked up a 19 inch wide screen high definition display as my primary monitor at work and moved my normal 19 inch to a secondary monitor. I’m not quite sure I like the wide screen display. If I was watching movies all the time it would be awesome, but this is work and I’m using applications and browsing the web.
When it comes to browsing the web I’d rather have vertical space than horizontal real estate. There aren’t many web pages that look real great on a wide screen. Studies have shown (don’t ask me for proof) that humans prefer to read shorter lines of text. I know I read it somewhere. A couple of hours after setting things up, I’d have to agree.
I want to scroll up and down as little as possible. With a wide screen display, there is a lot more vertical scrolling. I’ve rarely ever had to scroll horizontally when browsing web sites, so I don’t like all the extra horizontal space.
Just rotate the display you say? No thanks. It looks goofy next to the normal monitor and is way too tall. If I had two wide screen displays rotated I think it would be great. But I don’t.
Nick Momrik 