• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle




  • Father to a baby born at 1 pound, 4 ounces (580 grams for those who don’t know freedom units). Wife had preeclampsia and baby had to come out at 26 weeks (a little over 3 months early).

    Obviously this is not common, but it’s far from the first time my hospital has dealt with that kind of thing. Our daughter has had her share of complications and specialists we’ve had to see. There are still some developmental delays, but nothing we’re expecting long-term. It’s been a HELL of a ride, no doubt, but she’s coming close to her second birthday and overall doing great!

    Feel free to ask me anything you’d like about the experience. Although one NICU doctor said it best that every parent in this situation has the same 3 questions:

    1. Will they survive? (in our case, yes)

    2. Will they be normal? (As normal as an offspring raised in our house can be… Eventually)

    3. When can they come home? (Ours did about a month after due date, 4 months and 4 days after birth)


  • I also got Z-wave shades from Bali when Home Depot had a 50% off custom window treatments sale. They’ve been wonderful, and integrate with Home Assistant very nicely overall. Battery lasts a long time (about 6 months of use, with a daily “round trip” and they’re still at about 60%) and status gets reported back. One piece on one shade got machined weirdly so I couldn’t use the Z-wave, and they were happy to send a replacement.

    Bali is manufactured by a company called Springs Window Fashions. Might be worth looking into them and their other brands too!

    Oh, and Home Depot has sample material books you can take home for a night to see what would work best for you.






  • I probably count as that type of person you describe. I found a model on Lemmy that I really wanted to make and ended up buying an Ender 3 v2 cheap with a coupon at Micro Center. Has it totally been trouble-free? No. But I got it for a hundred bucks, plus a few addons (auto-level, flexible magnetic bed). I’d have to pay significantly more for a nicer one, when this is just an experimental hobby. I don’t care if I have to fiddle around a little more to get my occasional print going. In a way fine-tuning is part of the problem solving and tinkering I’m really looking for. I don’t care if the quality is less than what another printer can do. I don’t need a Cadillac when a Geo gets me to the grocery store just fine.

    Oh, and most of my issues were caused by shitty filament. Once I went from some weird stuff on Amazon to the Inland I’ve had better success with, things went way better. I’m surprised that’s not mentioned more actually.






  • I’m a little new to this stuff myself, but basically those devices are robust enough to get the job done but also simple enough that they don’t do anything else. I have Z-Wave for my shades, a temperature/humidity sensor, a tilt sensor for my garage door, a relay for the opener, and a light switch/scene controller for some physical button shortcuts. Very different things, and I don’t need an app from each manufacturer. Each device also creates a mesh network with one another, so these devices can have a pretty low-power, low overhead radio for battery life and still work pretty well even if you’re reaching far away from your hub.

    I haven’t used Zigbee but I understand it works pretty similarly. They seem to have some pretty cheap scene controllers so I was thinking of getting on that bandwagon (my shades were Z-Wave and that’s what got me into this rabbit hole so I’ve been using that to start)

    Also, an honorable mention for TP-Link’s Kasa series. Hardware is pretty solid and while I do need their app to get a device going, it’s made pretty well and integrates nicely to Home Assistant. Now if only they’ll put out that fan controller they announced a year ago and haven’t given a meaningful update over since!



  • I’ve heard the SD cards can be pretty flakey, so I immediately replaced the one that came with the rpi with something a little more “hardy” (Samsung Pro Endurance 256GB). It’s supposed to be able to handle a few years of streaming video turnover, so I wouldn’t think that a ~month of text logs would already hose it but I’ve been wrong before.

    Running hassos