These are just some small projects that I've been working on at home. There are a couple home automation and some networking projects.

Install ESPHome from https://esphome.io/guides/getting_started_command_line.html On Mac, you can't use the docker method indicated there, as there is no USB device access for docker.

Install pip on the mac in some other way. Some notes https://ahmadawais.com/install-pip-macos-os-x-python

Use ESPHome normally. I find that running the integrated dashboard works really well for uploading. Edit in a regular editor and click upload on the dashboard or just use the dashboard

esphome . dashboard

Create a file common/secrets.yaml with the following

  substitutions:
    api_password: some_api_password
    wifi_ssid: "your home wifi"
    wifi_password: "your home wifi password"
    hotspot_password: "some password for fallback wifi"
    memorial_lat: "some latitude"
    memorial_long: "some longitude"
    timezone: "your TZ name"

After losing our baby boy Herón Nicolás during labor, I wanted to have a small creative project to keep my hands busy. I made a small light that looks like a candle to help me think about him, and to take things slow, relax and live life. When the sun sets on his memorial location, the light turns on automatically.

This light has a single LED strip split into 2 logical segments. The full light is hidden from the API but each segment is controllable.

The last 3 LEDs make the 'fire' section of the candle and have a flicker effect automatically applied to it when it's turned on. The 'stick' or body section of the candle is controllable too.

There is a push button with a pull down resistor on pin GPIO13 that will switch the full length of the string on and off.

A small experiment for an infinity mirror. Functionally it's just a regular neopixel on a ESP8266 nodemcu light the same as all above.

The push button on GPIO13 with a pull down resistor uses the same code as the candle light.

These are some scripts to install and maintain the basic infrastructure of my network and smart home. The basic component is the Pi-Hole DNS server. I have found that using the router's DHCP and DNS resolution is unstable and results in many drops in connectivity. Using my own local DNS with ad blocking is much better and has been pretty stable for a good while. This runs in a Raspberry Pi 3 on top of Ubuntu Server.

• Run this to create and start the pi-hole docker container.

docker volume create dnsmasq

docker volume create pihole
docker run -d \
  --name=pihole\
  -e VIRTUAL_HOST=pi.hole\
  -e PROXY_LOCATION=pi.hole\
  --hostname pi.hole\
  --cap-add=NET_ADMIN\
  --network=host \
  --restart=unless-stopped\
  -v pihole:/etc/pihole\
  -v dnsmasq:/etc/dnsmasq.d\
  -e TZ="America/Los_Angeles"\
  -e ServerIP="192.168.1.5"\
  --dns=127.0.0.1 --dns=1.1.1.2\
  pihole/pihole:latest

• Run this to update the container

#!/bin/bash
docker pull pihole/pihole
docker rm -f pihole 
docker run -d \
  --name=pihole \
  -e VIRTUAL_HOST=pi.hole \
  -e PROXY_LOCATION=pi.hole \
  --hostname pi.hole \
  --cap-add=NET_ADMIN \
  --network=host \
  --restart=always \
  -v pihole:/etc/pihole \
  -v dnsmasq:/etc/dnsmasq.d \
  -e TZ="America/Los_Angeles" \
  -e ServerIP="192.168.1.5" \
  --dns=127.0.0.1 --dns=1.1.1.2 \
  pihole/pihole:latest