Comment by nsarrazin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsarrazin | Hacker News Reader

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Personally it made it very easy to build custom sensors/actuators for my Home Assistant setup. I have a folder with a bunch of esphome configs and just point Claude Code at it and tell it to add new entries for the stuff that I need, it's really good at that it can even write drivers for specific sensors autonomously. Granted you still need to do the wiring/soldering by hand (for now!)

Just around the home I have:

- a board that captures the audio output from my vinyl player and streams it on my LAN (so I can play my records on speakers across the house)

- one esp32 in each of my DIY speakers around the house driving the DAC+amplifier

- smart plant sensors that measure soil humidity, temperature, etc.

- a camera inside of a bird house, solar powered

- a 8x8 lidar ToF distance measurement board for detecting sleep phase

> smart plant sensors that measure soil humidity, temperature, etc.

Hah, that was one of my first projects long time ago before ESP32s even existed (PIC FTW!). Feels like this is one of those rights of passage projects for many people.

I'm curious about the sleep phase detection. What kind of data can you extract from the array beyond body movement? Do you find it better reflects how you feel than a wearable?

It's mostly tracking change in body movement. It's not necessarily better than a wearable but I don't want to wear a device while asleep so that was a no-go anyway.

Another constraint was that I wanted to be able to track the left and right side of the bed independently so that ruled out microphone and accelerometer based solutions. To be honest I can't say that it's working super well yet and I might replace it with flexible load cells in the mattress on the left and right side of the bed.

How do you deal with the audio latency / missed packets / etc?

I don't know - Claude did!

For the speakers I used a Louder-ESP32-Plus board which worked great out of the box: https://sonocotta.com/louder-esp32/

For the vinyl player it's a DIY build on a breadboard and I did have to use an ESP board with an external antenna. The PCB antenna was not working great on its own.

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