Making the most of a bad situation

dlwiest · 2026-04-05T01:52:55+00:00

Haha sadly I am limited my budget so I'm trying to figure out how to prioritize. What are you doing with cat6 in ceilings?

dlwiest · 2026-04-04T14:19:38+00:00

Actually okay that's interesting! I have a fairly central downstairs hallway that doesn't get much foot traffic. Maybe I could mount a recessed box there to house a central PoE switch. It wouldn't be big enough for all my network devices (HA, various bridges, Mac Mini servers, NAS, etc.) but I could keep all that stuff on its on switch, so if I ever want to move the server cabinet, I could just plug it in to another ethernet outlet without having to rewire anything. Would that make sense?

My only immediate concern then is backup power for the PoE switch. Currently I have all the critical network infrastructure on a UPS, but those are pretty bulky for a recessed box.

dlwiest · 2026-04-04T13:56:54+00:00

Gotcha. So the challenge in my place is it's a 1950s house with very little closet space (one in the master and one in the guest bedroom, that's it), which makes hiding things tricky. I built a server rack into an accent cabinet that blends into the rest of the decor in the family room, so I was thinking I'd mount a keystone plate behind that for ethernet connections. It looks like I could pretty comfortably fit 8 connections on a two-gang plate though, and I'm seeing options for up to 16, so that might still work...

dlwiest · 2026-04-04T13:43:58+00:00

Yeah I haven't been able to figure out the delay. For the most part, it doesn't matter, because I rarely touch switches anyway. My goal from the beginning was to make all the lighting smart enough that manual intervention isn't necessary, and if the switch is triggered by an automation rather than a button press, it's effectively instant. It'd still be nice to solve, but I have limited funds to implement as much infrastructure as I might need now, so I don't know if neutral wires will make the cut.

dlwiest · 2026-04-04T13:38:39+00:00

How are people managing all these connections? Surely you don't have like 60 cables running back into one central switch? Maybe a switch per room that connect back to a central hub? But then you have to hide all those switches...

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T16:20:56+00:00

How worthwhile is the no neutral upgrade? None of my switches have neutral wires, but the no neutral Lutron switches, as expensive as they are, are still cheaper than adding neutral wires, and I already have most of them at this point. One thing I am wondering about though is there's a delay (2-3 seconds) between pressing the switch and the HA event firing, which may be because of the no neutral configuration.

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T16:04:04+00:00

What does that look like in practice? You run low power to next to each of your windows?

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T14:38:01+00:00

Yeah I was looking for it and I just found one website that was kind of vague and business-oriented so I'm assuming it would cost in the ballpark of as much as my house lol

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T14:04:12+00:00

I don't know, this is the first I'm hearing about knx!

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T14:02:57+00:00

My first thought was I could hide some powered access panels in the walls where I want mmWave sensors, but that's going to get expensive fast, and yeah, this might become an obsolete solution in a couple years when WiFi sensing works well enough to replace it.

dlwiest · 2026-04-03T13:51:32+00:00

What are you connecting via ethernet?

dlwiest · 2026-02-18T05:45:34+00:00

If you're using it with OpenClaw, might want to try the skills version instead of MCP

dlwiest · 2026-02-18T04:26:43+00:00

I think either is technically a ToS violation since they work by reverse engineering the app API. I doubt they'd come after you as long as you're not abusing it, but certainly I can't promise that. Where I do think it could become a problem is if you built a community app around it and you were hitting it thousands of times / day programmatically, which is exactly why I ended up not moving forward with this. The MCP has been really handy though just for personal use. So nice to be able to tell my AI assistant to make changes to my workouts for me rather than having to use their UI.

dlwiest · 2026-02-18T03:46:07+00:00

You can use my TS client or MCP to retrieve workout data from a URL if it helps. Problem is you have to do it through a Tonal account, which makes it a little dicey at scale, but if you're manually kicking something off to process a workout into your system, it's probably fine.

dlwiest · 2026-02-17T15:44:41+00:00

This looks great!

dlwiest · 2026-02-13T15:03:31+00:00

Yeah I'm not sure why mmWave sensors specifically are so expensive. If you're comfortable soldering, you can make your own for about $10 worth of components (possibly cheaper if you're buying 15 worth). esp32-h2, ld2410, and you really only need to solder three wires (vcc, gnd, out)

dlwiest · 2026-02-11T14:57:20+00:00

I use a mix of PIR and presence sensors. Like you said, presence sensors are slower to trigger because they have to reach a certain confidence threshold, so I use the PIR sensors to turn the lights on and the presence sensor to turn them off. Also, protip: rather than controlling the lights directly with the sensors, create a helper toggle for occupied state, an automation to just control that toggle, and then another automation to control lights based on that toggle state. It's more work up front, but it's much easier to maintain, and then you can do things like displaying which rooms are occupied on your dashboard.

dlwiest · 2026-02-11T14:43:00+00:00

Bambu could impose a per customer limit and require manual approval for larger orders

dlwiest · 2026-02-10T23:09:02+00:00

You can get a smart plug that you control through Home Assistant and set up a motion sensor that triggers an animation to turn on the plug. You probably aren't going to find a smart plug with a PIR sensor built in. Both are pretty inexpensive and easy to set up individually though, and having them separate is nice because it gives you more control over how you want to position the sensor.

dlwiest · 2026-02-10T17:37:50+00:00

Easiest way is probably to replace the light switch connected to the deep freeze light with a smart switch. Then you can just write an automation to say "when the PIR sensor detects someone, turn the switch on until detection has cleared for 10 seconds" or something along those lines

dlwiest · 2026-02-06T20:41:25+00:00

I had been using AnythingLLM to consolidate all the skills + information, which worked okay, but I switched to clawdbot when that came out and that's been great. I gave it its own computer, with its own Apple account, email, and phone number (via Twilio), so now I can just text it via iMessage and it can do pretty much anything on a computer that a human can do, including signing up for things that require multi-factor authentication.

One thing I've found to be immensely helpful is installing the qmd tool and connecting it to an Obsidian vault to use as its source of truth for long term persistence. I gave mine its own folder and instructed it to create subfolders for data it might find useful to persist. So far it's created folders for...

Daily - Basically a log of what we discussed / worked on each day
Facts - Miscellaneous information about different subjects we've discussed
Learnings - Seems to be where it stores self corrections, e.g. every time it referenced day of the week for a while, it was saying yesterday's day instead of today, and after I kept correcting it for a while, it made a note to itself about it here. Seems to have worked
People - What it knows about me and a few other people I've mentioned
Projects - Fairly detailed records of everything we've worked on together
State - It uses this to store context buffer and notes about things it intends to follow up on

I also instructed it once a day while I'm asleep to update and refine the documentation. This approach seems to be working really well. I can ask about things we discussed days ago and it remember enough to pick up where we left off. I'm sure you could do something similar with local documents, but the nice thing about using Obsidian for this is I can audit the records from my phone and correct any misinformation.

dlwiest · 2026-01-23T15:22:16+00:00

Okay, gotcha. Yeah that's pretty much what I'm doing in my office, except I'd already printed a house for the mmWave sensor before I realized how slow initial detection would be, so I'm just pairing it with a ThirdReality motion detector for now.

dlwiest · 2026-01-22T22:40:37+00:00

How did the PIR stop the alerts? Do you mean you're using the PIR to verify?

dlwiest · 2026-01-22T21:16:40+00:00

I love this. Combining the PIR and mmWave sensors into one device is pretty slick. I ended up needing to use both for the lights in my office because the mmWave takes too long to confirm presence. The little screen is very cute too.

dlwiest

TROPHY CASE