This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Gradually moving into my new house
I got my Linux router and an Omada switch and one AP over PoE going. The one AP seems to cover the whole house and front and back yard well enough that I'm holding off adding more for now until we're more fully moved in and have every device online.
In the meantime I'm legit losing sleep over all of the smart features in this house.
Two things that are making me especially crazy are the sprinklers and the outdoor lighting, both which require cloud accounts to fully control, both have failed in one way or another to transfer from the previous owner. We've spent hours on this now and we are not done.
I'm so sick of this already that I'm going to rip the sprinkler controller out and replace it with OpenSprinkler. That path seems well worn and easy.
The outdoor lights seem more complicated, and offensively stupid to me. There's no physical switch for the outdoor lights, you must use an app. I want to rip the control box and make it much simpler (and not cloud only) but I still need to do more research because it runs some proprietary protocol and the lights themselves might not cooperate, though they possibly can be driven over PWM at their core. A single ESP32 with a buck converter and MOSFET might be all I need. Maybe I can swing some over to a real physical dinner switch too, which would be great for the lights above the BBQ. Not sure why the BBQ lights need to be smart in any way.
Some of the lights are deep underneath floating concrete slabs and seem impossible to service, but getting my phone camera in there suggests it's like a 4" piece of the proprietary LED strip just snugged into a mounting bracket which may not be hopeless. Might be able to fashion my own thing here if I really need to replace them to do a DIY setup without cloud garbage.
The other smart stuff is a bit less horrible but I never would have bought any of it.
The house came with a Reolink doorbell that seems like it could work well with self hosting and blocking from the Internet but I'm not sure I want it at all. I really don't care if someone knocks on my door when I'm not home? If they know me they can text. If they don't they are probably an annoyance. It may be able to work as a security camera but if that's what I want I should just get actual security cameras. Mostly it just spuriously alerts me about squirrels or people walking by. It is not any good for porch pirate deterrence since I live in a blue town where the police completely ignore these videos.
My HVAC system let's me set the thermostat remotely. Not sure this is that helpful? Maybe if I forget to set myself away before a trip I can save a few bucks a day.
The house has Philips Hue lights but I'm so bored of the idea I can't be bothered to install the app. It might be neat if all of the lights shifted towards red after sunset but if it's not easy to instantly override that it might get aggravating.
Meanwhile the two smart features I actually would like the house doesn't have. I would like smart locks so I don't have to dick with distributing physical keys or being home to let service people in.
I would like under-sink and under-washer leak sensors that auto closed the mains. The house has 3 bathrooms and two additional utility sinks. Odds of leak are actually non-trivial. But nope, sorry.
There's a radon mitigation system. I keep forgetting to check to see if this has an app.
Anyway, in theory smart homes should be awesome and I want it. In practice all of the apps are so enshittified or are such gimmicks I can't help but come off as a luddite.
UPDATE: The lighting controller was actually configured as owned by the installer instead of the previous home owner so he had to be woken up and told to release it to me. The sprinklers required attempting to pair something like 15 times over bluetooth before it worked reliably enough to let us configure the WiFi and acknowledge the new owner. Still angry enough to want to replace them out of spite.
Have you checked what percentage of the devices have integrations for Home Assistant? If the number is decent, you can at least side-step all the manufacturer apps and put them in one location. May even be able to reassert local control, depending.
Good idea. Most of them do, with perhaps the exception of the sprinklers until it's replaced with OpenSprinkler. Once I get my home server rack up and running I'll probably vibeslop a single simple dashboard that uses the drivers from HA. For push notifications I'll probably use a Telegram bot to DM me directly any pics or questions.
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I managed to get to the bottom of the performance issue from last week. As suspected it turned out to be the clean-up code, where the dead bugs never actually get cleaned up, and instead get rendered to the background texture forever. As more of them die, the more of them get rendered each frame, so performance drops. After fixing it, the basic game loop is playable sustainably at 100K+ monsters, so all is well.
I managed to figure out how to beat AI into submission. It turns out that providing a reference image solves the perspective issue. When I just uploaded the old retro sprite, said "this is a sprite I'm using, can you make a similar one, but better" it does the job pretty well (1, 2, 3). It doesn't stray from the form of the reference very far, even if I tell it to go wild, but that makes sense, since this is probably the same thing that is keeping the perspective in place.
I even got it to do decent animations! This was a bit of a trip, though. I'm not very good at describing what I want, so I first got an AI to write a prompt for the video-gen AI to make a natural looking "walking animation" and to explain that this is for a sprite, so the creature shouldn't actually move. I supplied the latter AI with a sprite from the previous step, and the generated prompt, and the result looks decent. The death animation was trickier, as I wanted something "splatty", but it kept making the splatter fly off screen. "Keep everything in frame" didn't work, so I figured maybe I should provide it with a final frame as another reference. I took the final frame of the animation where it flew too far, and went to an image-gen to clean it up. Took a few tries as it also didn't understand "keep the splatter within frame", but it did grok "make it as though the splatter exploded at lower velocity, and stayed close to the body". Don't know if it's "low velocity" or "close to the body", but it worked. So now back to the video-gen I provided it with the cleaned up final frame, and... while it did use it correctly, it still made the bug projectile-vomit blood off-frame. Thankfully modifying the video prompt to also include "low velocity" / "close to the body" splatter, actually got me what I wanted. I got the best results with Seedance, other models tended to do weird morphing effects I that had nothing to do with the prompt. Anyway, now I have to rescale, and cut up the animations to make them usable, but that should be pretty easy.
Finally, I started adding new weapons. Hans, get ze flammenwerfer!
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Not much progress this week. It was hot, so I spent pretty much all of my free time in the public pool, trying to get in a few seconds of exercise in between long sessions of dad time.
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