The Maestro Blog
I put my ideas and thoughts and builds over here.
Those Temu lights that never had an app? Now they can join your Home Assistant
The controller for my cheap patio lights was sending commands over 433 MHz. A $5 Tx/Rx module, a lot of patience separating my lights from every doorbell and car key in the neighborhood, and now Home Assistant both drives the lights and reacts to the physical remote. Along the way I accidentally captured a neighbor's car horn.
My bed base just got smarter with an ESP32
The bed already spoke Bluetooth. What is flaky is all the infra around it: a remote that died, an app that can only hold one BLE connection at a time, and no way to automate any of it. One ESP32-C3, permanently connected, fixed all three.
Why I replaced my NUT servers with an ESP32-S3
I spent years fighting Windows-only vendor software and then whole Raspberry Pis just to read one HID report out of my APC units. It turns out a single ESP32-S3 running as a USB host does the entire job, and it fits inside the UPS.
The toilet flush chain that justified my 3D printer
Every maker has to justify the printer to somebody. Mine is my wife. So when the metal chain in my toilet tank rusted through, I didn't buy a new one, I printed it. Here's the print-in-place design, and the one dead line of code that fused the whole thing into a solid brick.
How I reverse-engineered my NordicTrack treadmill
My treadmill talks Bluetooth, but Home Assistant could not see a thing. Turns out plenty of iFit machines ignore the standard fitness protocol and speak their own. Here is how I cracked it and got live speed, incline and calories landing in Home Assistant with zero taps.
Local Tuya control without the cloud
Those cheap Tuya smart plugs and breakers send every single on and off through a server in some other country. Here is how I cut the cloud out completely and run them straight on my own network, faster, private, and still working when the internet is down.
A one-tap baby tracker for Home Assistant
At 3 a.m. with a newborn you have one free hand at most, and zero patience for unlocking a phone to hunt for an app. So I got feed, diaper and sleep logging down to a single tap, both in Home Assistant and on a little 3D-printed button stuck to the nursery wall.