I was around pre-Internet, and it wasn't any better. In fact, this "virtual world" has been a huge positive for me and has given me many opportunities to expand my social group and have a more fulfilling life. I don't see the value in fetishizing disconnection.
masto
joined 1 year ago
My subscriptions are public: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisMasto/channels?view=56&shelf_id=0
Kind of a mix of well known science and tech stuff, and some out there things.
I flipped through and grabbed a few from different genres:
- Roderick on the Line
- Risky or Not?
- Penn’s Sunday School
- This Podcast Will Kill You
- Reconcilable Differences
- Accidental Tech Podcast
Zeiss wipes.
iPhone 15 Pro. Safari.
This post is basically what the Lemmy community has become, in a nutshell. I thought there would be a mass exodus from Reddit but it seems like the only people who came here and stayed are far out on the fringe. Between this kind of stuff and “I refuse to own a car because the infotainment system is not open source!”, I find myself more and more gravitating back to Reddit for some normality.. which is a hell of a thing to say.
It's a little confusing. Nextion makes "HMI displays". It's an integrated module that runs its own software, draws the UI, processes events, etc. It's a black box that just reports back to the processor "button 3 on page 1 has been pressed". You design the interface with that ugly Windows app and upload it to the display, but there is no direct access to the screen.
To make use of the Nextion display, you need something connected to it, and that's where the ESP32 comes in. It receives those "button 3 pressed" events and handles them, but crucially, it does not have raw access to the screen, so you can't just draw your own widgets on it like you'd be able to do on an ordinary display.
There are other projects to build your own controller with a touch screen and a microcontroller; the appeal of the NSPanel is that it's basically an ESP32 and a Nextion display conveniently prebuilt, has decent hardware and aesthetics, and it isn't hard to reflash it with ESPHome. Replacing the Sonoff firmware on the ESP32 doesn't change the limitations of the Nextion display.
I haven’t seen that software, but it doesn’t look like it can be used with Nextion screens, which are totally proprietary.
The way I use them is to reflash the firmware with ESPHome, at which point they have nothing to do with Sonoff. I got really into these things when they came out and made a video about the process: https://youtu.be/Kdf6W_Ied4o?si=4nh7kP28IglwVHBx. There are a bunch of different ways to use them including retaining the original software, but I kind of stopped paying attention when I got mine working.
It's worth noting that they have two different products. The "NSPanel Pro" is completely different, I think it runs Android. I haven't played with that at all.
I have one Kindle Fire using the Fully Kiosk Browser and a wall mount with a hidden power cord (https://a.co/d/05GVxVP). It uses the camera to turn on when you walk up to it. It’s ok, but I installed it 3 years ago and never really finished making a dashboard for it. In practice, we control the vast majority of stuff by voice with the Google/Nest Home integration, or switches. The big control panel thing doesn’t hold enough interest to even bother putting controls on it, and I mainly leave it showing air quality graphs.
Of more practical use are smaller panels for area-specific uses. I mainly standardized on NSPanel, because I was experimenting with them and ended up with a bunch. Example: https://youtu.be/DBzg7v1Q5Zo. I have a short attention span and tend to stop when it’s 90% good enough. I also have in other places a DIY HA SwitchPlate, and HASPone on a Lanbon L8.
I suppose that's true. Rereading my comment, it's a bit over the top. If I pretend now I don't know anything and start at http://home-assistant.io, it's not that hard to scroll down, see the thing, and buy it. I don't know exactly how I got so off-track when I tried. Probably I knew "a little too much", as in the words "home assistant blue" in the back of my head, Googled for that and got distracted by "I need to understand why there are two boxes and one isn't for sale anymore, so exactly what is the difference is between them?".
Coming back to that naive journey, though, I could see how someone could end up buying Green with no wireless dongle or Yellow with no CM4 (especially since you can't get one).
I still think that for the limited size of this ecosystem, choosing a box shouldn't be confusing. I can now understand where it came from, though, once I realized that HA Yellow was designed around a Raspberry Pi board that became unobtainable, so they had to go with a different architecture.
This will not be a popular thing to say in Lemmy, but I don’t think self hosting those things is going to reduce your headaches. I have worked in IT all my life, and I have lots of experience running services of all kinds, including my self-hosted home stuff. Nowadays, I am very mindful of the cost in time and hassle to DIY rather than let someone else handle it. When it comes to calendars, everything I see has an option to integrate with Google or Outlook, so I can’t imagine how sharing and syncing are going to be better if you move to some obscure open source thing. I fought that exact battle for an entire decade - you don’t want to get me started talking about CalDAV - and my life got so much easier when I gave up and moved my stuff to a standard provider.