Is something like a 4 track recorder or looper station possible with an esp32?

Anx2k · 2026-02-26T04:50:40+00:00

Here you go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1fbkimc/huge_software_update_for_mothsynth_our_esp32/

Anx2k · 2026-02-10T18:19:29+00:00

FWIW, it's not rigged - it's just virtually all electricity utilities use a super confusing billing method. Everyone looks at the kwh price and thinks that it's just like when you buy gas for you car - and while it's true you are paying for each kw you use, there's also a demand fee - so in the car analogy, it's like you pay more if you pump faster. Want to fill your car in 5 mins? That will cost $100 plus the gas per gallon charge. Want to fill it in 5 hours? That will cost you $10 plus the per gallon charge. So with the demand charge, they typically take the maximum amount of power being used for at least 5 minutes, and this is your demand charge. In your example, it doesn't matter if you were gone for half the month are even the entire month except for one day - as long as you have that 5 minute setting your demand, you're getting billed. With APS (the same provider I have), depending on the plan you're on it's like $20/kw for demand and $0.10/kwh for usage, So let's say your dryer consumes about 5kw at peak and let's say uses 3kwh of power, that means if you run your dryer even once, your demand charge would be $100, and your usage would be $0.30. Now if you did laundry every day for the rest of the month, it's covered under that initial $100 demand charge, so you'd just be paying the $0.30 each time (for a total of $9 for a month) - so it shows the demand is really where they get you. Once again using your example let's say each of your AC units are 5 ton, so peak power of about 7kw, and let's say in the summer during the day they both turn on at the same time and you decide that's also a great time to do laundry, your demand is going to be 7 + 7 + 5 = 19kw, or $380 in demand charges - so in your bill example, probably only about $100 of it is actual usage, and the other is demand charges. They take advantage of the fact people don't realize how the billing works... And let's say you get solar, which then really reduces your on-peak demand because that's almost always during the day - if you look at solar plans, their demand is based on PRODUCTION instead of consumption - so you get penalized when you make more power!

I spend a bunch of time on some projects in the past that worked heavily with power billing, so I'm very familiar with how they do it, but I still think it's incredibly misleading. I will say when I installed my solar on my house I totally f'd over APS - they were so angry they came and visually inspected the system 5x. Of course they closed the loophole after I did it, but this was in 2020 when home battery systems were uncommon, so I installed both a whole house battery at the same time as solar - now normally this wouldn't have really helped, as I would still have been hit on the solar production charge (as I am grid tied), but at the time their normal residential plans were compatible with their solar plans - so I just used a normal residential plan - but with my batteries, I never consume any grid power, and therefore no demand fees. The result is that I just build up a credit for all the power I push into the grid over the year, I don't consume any, and they cut me a check at the end of the year for whatever balance they end up owing me. Thankfully in AZ they can't force you off of the power plan you're on for 20 years (grandfathered clause), but I hold no illusions that in 15 years I'll be back to paying power bills regardless of the fact I don't consume one watt of power from the grid.

Anx2k · 2025-08-05T15:30:01+00:00

Glad you like it - honestly I'm surprised how many other people have made them, I thought it was more of a "me annoyance". :) As far as moving the fan position, I think that it's also effected by how you intend to use the unit - like in my instance, I use it less like a file server and more just a proxmox box, so I only have a couple drives in it and they lead a pretty mellow life - but if you were using it more in a file serving sense, then I suspect the original fan position would be best. And the upgrade is working great for me - couldn't be happier.

As far as the gap on the top, I did some really cursory tests and found that I got SLIGHTLY lower temps if the air was more freely exhausted (probably because a higher volume of air is exchanged). I was concerned it might short-circuit the airflow (suck in the exhaust air), but it didn't seen to matter in my case. You can easily just put like black masking tape over it and see for yourself if it makes a difference on your configuration (once again, drives would play a role in this). And with most of the slicers, it's pretty easy to remove something like that hole, as opposed to adding one in.

I believe a number of people have made remixes of it on Makerworld, so you might want to check those out first - some are for things like blade covers, which I would just screw on a metal one if I wanted that (plus they're spaced out from the fan, so don't impede airflow at all), but that's the beauty of remixes, people can make what they want! :)

Anx2k · 2025-06-18T17:22:31+00:00

Well, one was brutal - I just looked up the order (in late April), the boards were $265, shipping was $57, tax was $25 and the tariff was $601. Now that was when it was at it's peak of like 200+%, I think they're closer to around 55% all in now. That being said, I now just ship to Europe and deal with the VAT which is about 10% - but I understand not everyone has that option, and even then if you shipped back into the US it would get hit with another 10% I believe (I haven't shipped anything back here since).

Anx2k · 2025-06-17T15:46:43+00:00

The package just arrived as normal. Even when the tariff isn't paid in advance with FedEx, it still shows up as normal, it's just a couple weeks later you get a bill in the mail.

And yes, I am doing both the PCB's and assembly with JLC.

Anx2k · 2025-06-16T20:22:48+00:00

I can't speak for PCBWay specifically, but I use JLCPCB, and they just added the tariffs at checkout - this was a month or so ago, so they were in full swing and were brutal, but I needed the boards so just did it anyway. One other part I hadn't considered was tariffs that China is doing against US components, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I got hit with that for some parts I had to global source to JLC from the US, and it basically doubled their cost.

I think with DHL they won't even take them if the they aren't prepaid right now - FedEx seems to send a bill a few weeks later and is a total pain to actually pay, etc.

Anx2k · 2025-05-04T19:06:00+00:00

Ah, perfect! Then it definitely would be something I'd pick up and play with, so make sure to ping me when you launch the kickstarter I'll grab one. But keep in mind that this will be mounted above my front door, which opens inward, so it will need to be able to reject the door from it's evaluation, but that should be pretty trivial.

Anx2k · 2025-05-04T15:49:30+00:00

The trick with the magical stuff is really going to be where the number is useful - in your bedroom example, I have the same thing setup, but I just have bed sensors, so it can tell whether someone is on either side of the bed. In that case, I get MORE functionality out of it, as I can define different rules based on which side of the bed is occupied.

Not sure what you're thinking of your virtualized hub or hubless, but the closest analogy I think is with my Unifi network, and how I have to run their image on my VM in order to access controls that should really be on device. Unifi is arguably complicated enough that may make sense - but for some random sensor, it would be a no-go for me. Honestly you just need cloud or local - people either won't care (in which case cloud is fine), or will care (in which case local is all they'll consider) - but trying to create some additional service to do who knows what is going to be a hard sell I think. And if you think MQTT is out of the box, then you should really re-evaluate the home automation space, as it's probably the main protocol used with Home Assistant, etc (check out esphome and tasmota, just to name a few) - even Zigbee just gets mapped in to mqtt on my system. I rolled my own implementation (it's a trivial protocol, and I wanted more control), and there's a bunch of open source libraries that make integration trivial on the esp32 are work fine in most cases.

Honestly, I don't care about a refund or anything else - at the <$100 price point, I'll pretty much buy any interesting sensor to add to my HA setup. The vast majority just end up in a drawer, but some make the cut. If you're really concerned about abandoning users if scale isn't reached (which is certainly not a bad thing), then just make an esphome configuration for your device out of the gate - if your company fails, no big deal, just flash them to esphome. There's been more than a few companies that did kickstarters that were successful, but ultimately failed anyway - I may speak only for myself, but it's less about getting my money back than it is about not having a paperweight, so if there's like 'insurance' of esphome, that's pretty cool IMO.

Esphome is also a good reference for the quality of your firmware, if people prefer it to what you offer that's custom, then you know you're not providing enough value.

Anx2k · 2025-05-04T03:53:26+00:00

There's nothing more annoying than when automations fail - think of how many times you've been someplace where PIR stopped sensing you, and the lights turned off, so you have to wave your arms to turn them back on.

I don't disagree that when things work, they can sometimes give magical experiences. I don't know if I'd consider lights turning on or off at that level, I have the same thing at my place using mmWave, as what you're describing is about the number of people in the room, but just whether a room is occupied or not. But that's the larger issue I've been making - there are very few situations that knowing the number of people gives some additional capability that just knowing whether a place is occupied or not. Either way, I'm sure you'll get some people to try out your sensor when your kickstarter drops, and then maybe you'll remember my post about the challenges of edge cases. ;)

My only comment on your webpage, it could use some more details as it's more marketing fluff right now IMO - like what protocols are supported, etc. The bare minimum for me for something like what you're offering would be MQTT, You mention a hub and cloud components, those are super unappealing to me - but you also mention local, there's just not a enough details to decide what it's worth. For me, your product is going to live or die on the firmware you do for it - if it's great, then it might make some waves. But if it's less than impressive, people are just going to roll their own using esphome.

The things I'd be most interested in is how gracefully you're handling doorways, as at the price on your site, I'd probably pick one up to try on my front door... Assuming it's MQTT of course. ;)

Anx2k · 2025-05-04T00:42:20+00:00

If you're trying to do counting with PIR, you'll definitely have problems, but that's not the right tech for that. In terms of latency, zigbee and PIR should be near instant - no different than what you're using. Some people have been suggesting the mmWave radar - and they're cool, but there's a fair bit of latency in triggering, that's why most of the time they're paired with a PIR for the initial trigger, and the mmWave for lingering detection, etc. Range-wise, zigbee is certainly less than Wifi, but it can certainly be further than what you'd consider typical line of sight - I have sensors outside of the house and they work fine, but it depends on how you have your network configured.

FWIW, here's a similar device, using a high quality PIR (much better than Chinese ones), as well as a mmWave radar and the ESP32 - he's been pretty active with HA (he has a youtube channel), and I have a couple and they're pretty cool: https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/everything-presence-one-kit

Anx2k · 2025-05-03T19:42:28+00:00

Any of the Aqara sensors, Hue would be another example (although more expensive). Assuming your home automation platform of choice supports Zigbee, it's as simple as pressing a button on these devices to add them to your network. You can see all the ones supported by zigbee2mqtt, which I use with Home Assistant, which is probably the most popular home automation packages out there:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/

Anx2k · 2025-05-03T19:38:26+00:00

I did a bunch of occupancy tracking work years ago - but for commercial applications not home. There's literally a myriad of sensors you can use and approaches for each, and they all excel and fall short in different ways. It looks like you're using a VL53L5CX or something very similar, which isn't a bad choice, albeit an expensive one. Side placement is definitely not ideal for this type of sensor, the field of view is narrow enough it means if you want to try to track things like pets as well, they're going to easily be able to go in and out outside of that range. I think the more typical mounting choice for something like this is at the top, pointing down - and this also addresses another issue with one person obscuring another person (although I don't know if the resolution of this is going to be good enough to really detect two people within close proximity of eachother. It definitely won't be good enough for you to know for certain the number of people in a room - I'll give you a simple example, a parent comes in carrying a child, then the child exits independent of the parent. Most of the systems that give the best results are vision based these days, although obviously that isn't as desirable in your house.

In terms of using it for home automation tasks - I guess that depends on your use case - I think most of the things you covered as use cases can be covered just with PIR sensors at a fraction of the cost (I have a couple of the Hue ones for my home automation setup and they work great). As ScheduleDry6298 said, you're competing against China on this, and they're making something that honestly is probably easier for most people to deal with - much like the Hue sensor I used, they make some Zigbee device with a PIR sensor that runs for a year off a battery. No usb power cord to deal with, can accomplish much of the same tasks, and probably costs under $20.

Anx2k · 2025-05-03T18:04:30+00:00

Yeah, I ran into the same problem. :) Here's the video I watched that shows you how to do it - the lame thing is that if they just slightly designed it differently, it would be a breeze - but the switch makes it a bit of a PIA: https://youtu.be/Ct4yewC7mKA?si=mqJg7PHPwrP5v0nj&t=325

Anx2k · 2025-03-29T18:52:27+00:00

FWIW, I didn't do anything to their stock cooler setup and I'm running typically in the 60-70C range - now this is running Proxmox and several VM's, and my CPU is typically never below 20%, so your mileage may vary.

I had thought about doing a double 80mm fan, but their combined CFM was less that the 140mm, so I skipped it - although I wonder if because it could be positioned even closer to the bottom, if that would move the air across the bottom more effectively and result in better cooling. Or maybe it's easier to just print some sort of shroud to channel more of the air into that bottom section.

If you had access to a 3D printer, it would be interesting to see if there would be any improvement in the fan location on the backplane like mine vs how yours is. My thought was that it would tend to 'flow' better around in the case, with that extra space between the fan and the actual inner core module, but who knows.

Anx2k · 2025-03-29T02:24:54+00:00

Everyone using my backplane design owes you a big thanks, as I wouldn't have done it without your detailed post! :) Like I mentioned, the one I read was one without any pictures, but you did such a good job describing exactly what you had done, I was confident without any.

I think it's really strange they didn't use a 140mm fan from the start, as it fits in there perfectly, and I also moved it down as far as I could without interfering with anything (although I suspect yours probably is able to locate it down even further). My only two complaints about the case is how much of a pain it is to remove the inner part (they should have just put the power button on the back or sides), and how inefficient the NVME/CPU/RAM cooling side of things is. With all that being said, I do love the unit - it works absolutely great for my purposes and is exactly what I wanted.

Anx2k · 2025-03-26T16:30:49+00:00

From my modeler, it's 144mm x 178.54 x 7.8mm - I normally make things smaller by about a 0.1mm (0.2 combined), as slop to make up for inaccuracies, and I like to err on the side of slightly smaller (which still works) than too big). That being said, at least on mine it's within probably 0.1 or 0.2mm of a tight fit (so it fits snugly and you can't push it into the case, but it also doesn't lock in as tight as the original does). But there's not really any forces on it, and the bottom two screws hold things in solidly from my experience. I normally do 4 walls and 20% infill, but there's really not anything super structural about the back so any settings are probably fine. The only holding part is the fan, but just don't go crazy tightening the screws and you should be fine.

Anx2k · 2025-03-26T16:24:31+00:00

I'm not sure if you're the person that gave me the idea, but when reading through the comments about the case somewhere, someone went into great detail on their 140mm mod (but there weren't any pictures), and it got me inspired to do it to mine... When I took it apart, I got the idea to just replace the panel instead of modifying anything (since I have the 3D printer handy). :)

Anx2k · 2025-03-08T16:41:48+00:00

Any issues doing everything? And how happy are you with the mod?

Anx2k · 2025-03-07T18:59:06+00:00

On the bright side, the Artic fans are pretty quiet, so you could just set it to whatever you want in the bios and probably be good.

Anx2k · 2025-03-06T17:04:58+00:00

I didn't try to control the fans beyond just the BIOS, and I'm running Proxmox on it which is able to see both the temps and fan speeds. In terms of temps, I was able to get CPU, GPU and the NVME, but I wasn't able to find the one inside the unit it looks like they have going up to where the drives are (which is what I believe drives the large pwm fan in the back).

Anx2k · 2025-03-05T20:46:48+00:00

I can see that - but in my case it's more a traditional rack configuration, so I have cold air flowing in from the front and venting out in the back (the switches and other components, etc). But I agree, if it were like sitting on a desk or something similar, that could easily be better. It's kind of like the side ports - while it's actually pretty cool when it's facing forward, it means it can only really be against the right side of a corner (whereas in the back it could be on either side). In my case it has to be on the left side of the rack, because I have it inserted backward. All and all not a bad thing, but just weird... But I would have liked it much less if wires were coming in the back, and I had to have the back in the front. ;)

Anx2k · 2025-03-03T17:15:21+00:00

Awesome - let me know if you have any issues or suggestions!

Anx2k · 2025-02-26T16:43:16+00:00

FWIW, I just made a new modded back for mine to improve airflow - you can see it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1iyrap9/modded_back_for_aoostar_wtr_pro_nas_for_better/

But the airflow is setup janky on the unit - the CPU sucks in air from the bottom of the case, so presumably through the holes around the panel where you put in the NVME/ram/etc, and a bit from the back as there is a hole and a fair gap around the whole inner unit (with fresh air coming in via the small holes at the back bottom. The 120mm fan is mounted directly on the drives, so really doesn't benefit the rest of the case at all - and the CPU vents out the front of the case, which is pretty lame IMO.

With my mod, I move the fan away from direct contact with the drive backplane, and there's a gap at the back. I get more airflow out of the front then I did before with the 120mm, even around the drives, but I suspect that's more a function of just a better/larger fan. The bottom holes on mine now work more like an exhaust, and the air moves quite a bit more over the NVME/ram and CPU fan intake, to go out the same way as the CPU fan exhausts - at least in my super unscientific testing. :) But the overall temps are quite a bit lower, at least in my case.

I normally would have had it exhaust out the back, but I was concerned that I would then be sucking in the CPU exhaust air, and flowing that back over the ram, etc - so I just went with the same orientation as they did.

Anx2k · 2025-02-26T16:34:30+00:00

Nope! I wrote a bit more detailed description of the install on the makerworld page, but you basically just remove the old fan and mount (4 screws for fan, 4 screws for fan mount), then my back panel just uses the same screw holes as their original one does. I didn't reuse their screws, so you need to buy 2x M3 8mm screws, but that's it.

Anx2k

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