Semicromulent Rambling

Wio Nodes are tiny wireless controller boards built by Seeed Studio as part of the Grove system which supports  hundreds of hardware widgets and sensors . The nodes were designed to be configured with the Wio app and linked through a Wio server. It's unclear if the Seeed Studio Wio service is just down temporarily or entirely deprecated, but the Wio server  displayed an error while trying to setup some old Wio Nodes  I had sitting in a box. I assumed these nifty little boards were rendered useless by service deprecation, and none of my favorite open source firmwares mentioned support for the "ESP-WROOM-02" chip on the board. It wasn't until a few days ago when I learned that "ESP-WROOM-02" is not the chip but an assembly, which uses the popular ESP8266 chip at its core. Now the question was not if but how can I flash it? Seeed Studio's  Github repo  didn't include flashing instructions but did include the board schematics which held the key to flas...

This is my take on a Home Assistant control panel platform. It's based on this guide to creating a Raspberry Pi minimal browser kiosk but with wake-on-motion and some tweaks to improve the experience. Background info, why I chose this over the other options, and plans for future expansion are at the bottom, for anyone interested. My plan is to install one in each room with room-specific widgets. Hardware RaspberryPi 3 B 8GB or larger high quality microSD Official  Rpi 7" touchscreen Official  Rpi camera v2 Smartipi touch2  case with camera mount USB keyboard for initial HA login Assemble the parts according to the included instructions but keep the microSD out for now for imaging. Raspbian lite setup Image Raspbian Lite to the SD using the imaging tool or other method. Create an empty file on the SD boot directory named ssh to enable SSH on boot. Create a file in the SD boot directory named wpa_supplicant.conf with the following content, replacing the variables with ...