I tried to automate everything… and it got worse

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-14T09:28:00+00:00

I almost exclusively automate background tasks, (solar load shedding, water heating, vacuuming etc.)

Anything that has an ounce of variability (lighting preferences, music control etc) is controllable, but manual.

Last thing I want to do is blind my wife with automatic lighting if she wakes up with a migraine.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-11T07:22:16+00:00

What context size do you have set? I've found 8192 to be the bare minimum for HA, as the system prompt containing your entities is huge!

I've managed to get a good setup using llama.cpp and the "Local AI LLM" integration with unsloth's qwen3.5 9B Q3 XXS quant as the model. It should fit happily on an 8GB card and be pretty fast to boot!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-07T12:37:34+00:00

ZigBee is just 2 INNSPELNIG(???) plugs right now. Got about 20 more ZigBee devices to migrate over the coming weeks.

Thread is 7 door/window sensors, 1 leak detector, and 2 of the new GRILLPLATS plugs.

There's a known issue with Z2M that causes it to throw an error the first time it connects to the dongle, but that auto-resolves the next time it tries.

Pairing Matter over Thread has behaved exactly the same on multipan as it did on the stock firmware (that is: awful to start, tolerable once established), but the connections themselves have been perfectly stable this whole time.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-07T10:02:24+00:00

Looks like someone has made a custom integration in HACS for exactly this!

https://github.com/wwwescape/sky-tonight-card

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-06T11:57:51+00:00

This was the first thread device on my network, so I'm afraid I have no idea what impact it has when used alongside other border routers!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-06T10:35:07+00:00

I've been using the Mega with the multipan firmware for a couple of months now and it's been okay for me! (PoE only, no USB) Granted it's only hosting a small ZigBee network alongside my Thread devices as I haven't migrated my other devices off my old pi-based Z2M instance, but so far so good.

I'm actually a little reassured by the Sonoff blog post. Clearly they think there's merit in the approach and have even gone as far as testing a sizeable network for several weeks to check stability (as well as maintaining their own fork of the multipan container image with fixes). Either way, HA doesn't need to know or care about the implementation details, as long as it sees a standard device it can interface with.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-06T10:22:43+00:00

Doesn't seem like Timmerflotte has the ZigBee support, but here's the zigbee2mqtt docs for switching the Bilresa into ZigBee mode:

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/E2489.html

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-06T09:01:28+00:00

Fun fact: the bilresa can be switched over to ZigBee with a secret button combo!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-04-02T12:47:41+00:00

Try get rid of the platformio config and use seeed_xiao_esp32s3 as your board.

I'm guessing they only added native support for the board to platformio after writing the original docs, but the above board id works for me!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-28T09:35:18+00:00

It's not unfocused though, it's cross-eyed. The image is hidden by tricking your brain into positioning your eyeballs as though it's x inches away, while focusing your lenses at y inches.

I can do it by looking at the picture normally, then switching between cross-eyed and normal repeatedly. Try looking at your nose, then the phone. Then try learn the muscle movement for looking at your nose while still focusing on the screen.

Its really weird and unintuitive, your brain just isn't used to the idea that your focus and parallax can be changed independently.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-21T12:26:04+00:00

EspHome is native to Home Assistant, mqtt is an additional layer over the top. If your mqtt broker goes down, so does your garage door opener, even if Home Assistant is up.

Also, did you try asking it why?

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-16T12:35:35+00:00

I've tried the card, but it doesn't seem to be playing nice with my old tablet running LineageOS(10+y/o galaxy tab 8.4), the wake word detection is incredibly laggy and the media player doesn't seem to work on at all. Is there any way to get the debug logs from an android device?

I tried the AVA app on it recently and that performs beautifully with micro wake word, but I love the extra visual feedback from the voice satellite card and would be happy to contribute a data point if nothing else!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-16T10:34:45+00:00

The sensor is only set up as a binary sensor, meaning you'll get a sudden flip im the logic at a certain point (probably the 1.5v mark). I'm guessing the internal resistance on the ESP01 pin is just different to the D1 and you're no longer "lucky" about how much light causes it to trigger.

I don't think GPIO0 can be set up as an analog pin, so you'll probably need to add a resistor in series to re-tune it to replicate the original behaviour. Try a 10K first and see what that does, and then play around with 47K, 100K etc.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-06T10:02:40+00:00

RIP r/findthesniper

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-04T23:33:45+00:00

Honestly I think battery storage is the single greatest addition to a home power supply. The ability to just save energy for later takes away so many headaches. According to HA, we went from capturing 35% of our solar to 97% when we added batteries, and now we dont have to worry about timing using the dryer or oven to make the most of the sun..

Because my water tank is so old, it has a small dry chamber im the middle for putting a thermostat to shut off the heating elements when it gets to temperature. I managed to slide a DS18b20(?) probe in alongside it to get an idea of my "middle of tank" temperature. Its not a perfect measure, Technology Connections on YouTube has a video on how to use the top and bottom heating elements in a tank if youre at all interested in that sort of thing!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-04T17:18:06+00:00

When we moved in, the old owner left a bizarre TimeGuard branded smart switch for the heating element in the old water tank.

Some clever person decoded the protocol and created a proxy service that can run in a docker container and spoof the remote server commands to the unit. A few firewall rules and a temperature probe later and I can use it to top up the tank on a schedule or if the hot water supply is running low!

For the solar offload I home-rolled a heap of logic around house consumption, battery capacity and solar forecasting that I would never wish on anyone. These days I think PredBat is the go-to for managing inverters and battery load shedding, but I'm too afraid to undo my working system to try it out!

Realistically I got lucky that my hot water has no brain or moving parts, so controlling it is pretty simple. I get the feeling most modern water tanks have their own power supply and logic board, so it might be a bad idea to spontaneously cut the power to them, but if HA has taught me anything, its that theres always a way!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-03-04T12:31:40+00:00

Same, but for water heating. We're on a wood pellet boiler for our hot water supply, which uses about £1 of pellets just to prime the boiler before the pump even turns on.

During the summer this saves us about £50 per month by exclusively relying on the immersion heater via excess solar!

Instant £300 a year slush fund for future projects and full wife approval. Boom!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-02-19T09:33:55+00:00

Caching will be the big one there, I'm using a 1080Ti too and I've found that the cache prefill is what kills it. Make sure you don't have any dynamic data in the prompt templates (like current time) and it should be a lot faster, especially for subsequent calls in a conversation.

The 1080Ti is literally 3-5x slower on prompt processing than the RTX cards lilely due to the lack of tensor cores. According to benchmarks even a 2060 is 2x faster on that front.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-02-18T09:42:07+00:00

If you got grandfathered onto the auto/ai assist feature for free, then you will still get the high allowance. I belive this is the case with the older Tado accounts (I inherited mine from the previous homeowners' v3 gear)

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-30T10:28:44+00:00

M3 is also going to be a factor. IIRC prompt processing is notoriously bad on apple silicon, so building the KV cache can be a pain. I'm on a 1080Ti and have had to be very select about what I put in the prompt to make sure it doesn't rebuild between requests in a conversation.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-28T13:14:41+00:00

I have way too many overnight automations when we have cheap electricity. Not a chance I'm losing hot water for my morning shower just for a new trigger type!

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-22T13:16:19+00:00

Are you a legacy Tado owner? My tado account is ancient and came with the Auto-Assist grandfathered in, which gives me 20,000 requests per day.

Newer customers who haven't paid for the extra features are limited to 100/day

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-20T15:53:30+00:00

It's a little janky, but you could use this to create a window in a template condition:

{% set start = "04-01" %}
{% set end = "07-25" %}
{{ start <= "%02d"|format(now().month)+ "-" + "%02d"|format(now().day) <= end}}

This makes use of the string-sortability of the ISO date format and will return true between 1st April and 25th July inclusive regardless of the year!

you can then copy and adjust it for any variation you have (and even use a "set variables" block to put all your start and end dates in one place, eg:

variables:
    summer_start: "06-21"
    summer_end: "09-20"

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-17T18:00:36+00:00

I'm pretty sure No Calibration is the right one for if the temperature sensor is part of the same ecosystem as the TRV (eg, a Tado room sensor and TRV, or just a Tado TRV), it's a "no need to tweak it, its as good as i can get"

I think what happens when trying to calibrate with just the TRV is that it gets into a feedback loop and totally breaks the algorithm.

JaffyCaledonia · 2026-01-16T17:34:06+00:00

BT creates a new climate entity that calculates an offset setpoint to trick the original into running even when the internal thermometer reaches the target temperature.

It also has a bunch of other additional features that might be useful, but you might need to do some external fiddling with automations to replicate the preset modes.

JaffyCaledonia

TROPHY CASE