tbyehl

Sorry for your loss.

And that's kinda crazy bad luck. Every story I recall reading of a mountain lion getting into a chicken enclosure built well enough to defend against a determined racoon or fox has been a young cat strolling through an open door, not forcing their way in.

Are you not on any chicken social media groups? If you're paying someone else to build something with, uh, curb appeal — fully painted, metal roof, nice hardware — $20k is real easy.

> Or is that just me?

Click around on Karlstack some more.

Keep thinking like that and you'll be a ratings agency for Mortgage-Backed Securities.

Knowledge that my employer might detect or block a software or USB mouse jiggler is why I ended up making a BLE mouse jiggler out of a Pico W.

C3 boards are a mess, almost all of them are single-port with a USB-UART chip despite supporting USB-CDC & JTAG. Lots of C6 boards are dual-port but sometimes they're single-port, typically without a USB-UART chip. And to make it more confusing, sometimes a single-port C6 board will have a USB-UART chip that's hanging off a USB hub chip.

S3 has full USB-OTG support and most boards are either dual-port or single-port without a USB-UART chip. I dig 'em because I can put the TinyUF2 bootloader on them and get that Pi Pico experience of having them come up as mass storage.

Except for these S3 boards I bought in Arduino Uno format where the designer made every decisions as wrongly as possible — single USB, USB-UART chip, and the USB pins broken out to Arduino pins instead of using one of the optional headers they added.

S3 also has USB support that I've come to hugely appreciate on dev boards... tho I just got some oddball single-port boards that used a CH340 anyways. Grrr.

The annual HIPAA training I was subjected to for nearly a decade on the EMR provider side of things never brought up these scenarios, but the Privacy Rule does have carve-outs that allow PHI to be transmitted to entities that would not be considered Business Associates, if the patient consents.

I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft not forcing updates upon their users was considered an existential threat to humanity.

I turned a light-up Pac Ghost into an indicator lamp for my Uptime Kumar instances.

https://github.com/psitem/uptime-kuma-pacman-ghost-light

I've been working on a replacement controller for the Omlet automatic chicken coop door. They've recently released their own connected controller but given the shortcomings of the original I'm not sure I trust it to be reliable enough to leave my feathered friends unsupervised for days at a time.

Next in the queue is replacing my ATHOM garage door controller with my own that will add a second reed switch to detect that the door is fully open.

And I'm mulling over ways I could monitor the feed level in my chicken feeders. And maybe close them off at night to keep other critters out. But it's tricky because I don't want to replace what I have with a design that might be easier to automate, as they've held up well against the rain and I'm lazy.

> Very valuable comment with a lot of interesting information, just doesn't apply to context.

I guess I'll accept that instead of dragging this thread on ;-)

Except...

"Why doesn't this random cheap ESP32 board fit properly on a breadboard" is a super common new user frustration that's easily avoidable if they knew it was something they needed to be aware of, and I don't understand why people who should know all that will point people to ~28mm boards. My bad for not also pointing out that "ESP32 38-pin Narrow" (NodeMCU ESP32S) boards should be 25.4mm and are plentiful on Amazon at the very cheap end of the pricing spectrum.

Mail just came, can confirm this AliExpress listing is a dimensionally correct unsoldered ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1-N16R8 copy for $5.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806260092043.html

https://imgur.com/a/3d0rKdO

As a fellow lazy hobbyist, I'm gonna suggest that buying the cheapest ESP32 / -C3 / -C6 boards can be a poor value. The cheap ones are often > 25.4mm wide so on a single standard breadboard the pins are only accessible on one side[0]. Also having recently been fighting CircuitPython running out of memory parsing a ~35KB response from a web service, boards with some PSRAM are real nice to have. And speaking of CircuitPython, ESP32-S3/S2 boards can run the UF2 bootloader for that Pi Pico-like experience.

Waveshare's super compact ESP32-S3-Mini (or Zero) has become my first-to-grab. For 5 direct from their China site it works out to $7.35/ea pre-soldered with shipping or save a buck each for unsoldered. 2MB PSRAM and 13 usable GPIO. They also have less cheap -S3 boards in Arduino Nano ESP32, Pi Pico, and ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1[1] formats. And the oddball ESP32 One in Pi Zero format, using an ESP32 w/ off-die PSRAM. They sell on Amazon, too.

A genuine Espressif ESP32-S2-DevKitC-1-N8R2 is $8 on Amazon, a relative bargain if you need it tomorrow and can live with one less LX7 core and no Bluetooth.

[0] If you use the trick of spanning two breadboards side-by-side, that's an extra cost that could have gone towards a better smaller board.

[1] Beware of cheap boards claiming to be copies of Espressif's 25.4mm board designs, many have been widened to ~28mm. Bad ESP32-S[3|2]-DevKit[C|M]-1 copies give themselves away by having enough room on top to put pin labels next to the pins instead of between them.

Tasmota is firmware you can configure on-device[0] while ESPHome is a YAML-driven construction kit for compiling firmware specific to a device's configuration. Every change to the YAML is a compile-and-flash cycle.

Tasmota is only for Espressif platforms. ESPHome has expanded to support BK72xx, RTL87xx, and the Pico W, but good luck figuring out what's actually implemented on those platforms.

ESPHome supports more sensors/peripherals. Some ESPHome Components[1] simplify the combination of multiple sensors and peripherals to accomplish a task to basic YAML (check out the different Cover components).

Tasmota on ESP32 has an embedded scripting engine with REPL (Berry). ESPHome is... complicated[2]. Triggers, Actions, and Conditions can accomplish very simple automations in pure YAML. For more complicated tasks, you'll be writing C/C++ code.

ESPHome releases frequently. If you're using it with Home Assistant, it will constantly nag you to update ESPHome and all of your ESPHome devices. Tasmota releases every few months. Tasmota suggests not upgrading a device unless you have a particular need[3].

[0] Pre-compiled Tasmota binaries work for most purposes, but there are situations where you might need to compile your own to support less common features or devices.

[1] https://esphome.io/components/

[2] https://esphome.io/guides/automations

[3] https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Upgrading/

I once saw a survey, possibly from the Annals of Improbable Research, asking how many people constitute a bureaucracy. My favorite response: One German.

See also: The Checkpoint Charlie scene from the 1985 movie Gotcha!

Notably, Synology's agent-based backup software requires BTRFS but will not back up BTRFS.

https://kb.synology.com/tr-tr/DSM/help/ActiveBackup/activeba...

All the Espressif RISC-V chips so far are missing the USG-OTG feature of the S2/S3 and RP2040.

Probably being too nice to them. IME, a lot of (solar) heat and neglectful watering makes 'em mean.

I wasn't aware that PowerToys had that, so thanks for pointing it out. In general I've been satisfied with the built-in Snap feature but since getting a 49" 32:9 1440p monitor I've been wishing the 3-column options offered horizontal splits.

They are that Brian. I went to work for a BBS software company straight out of high school and can't recall ever hearing of COCONET outside of this beef with Jason.

Much of the neighboring areas of north Georgia and western North Carolina also have widely available fiber from the local electric and telephone co-ops. Obama's broadband stimulus paid for much of a fiber backbone that connects them running from north of Atlanta through the Tennessee Valley to Asheville and beyond.

My place in WNC is, sadly, just outside Blue Ridge EMC's footprint. Pay $100/m for 100/4 cable. The billboard on US-129 proclaiming "Big City Speeds & Performance, Small-Town Personal Service" irks me every time I pass by because the service is every bit as shitty as that slogan made me expect.

He's not wrong.

Source: Have around a dozen varieties of chicken.

Some ISDN TAs supported data-over-voice for 56kbps per channel. Useful in areas where data calls has per-minute charges but unlimited local "voice" calls were included in the monthly charges.

It's not complicated, it's right where it should be, it just has a label that somehow manages to be both highly correct in a technical sense and completely unintuitive to anyone who doesn't already know what it's called.

At that scale, Synology NAS running MailPlus can be very cost-effective. Comes with five mailboxes. Buy two, activate MailPlus High Availablity — which also pools the mailbox licenses, and you're set for 10 mailboxes over the +/- 8 years they'll actively support the device. With the rest of their software suite it can tick all the boxes tho the lack of a MAPI/EAS implementation is a miss.

My special talents are disappearing that thing which was just in my hand and pulling up to the out-of-order gas pump without realizing before I've exited the car.

Malfunctioning pumps are everywhere but they don't have much impact — there are other pumps, and all the occupied pumps will cycle customers in just a few minutes, and if you must move on to the next station, you almost certainly are able and won't experience further problems.

If you're not wiring anything but power, LilyGo T-Dongle-S3 is an ESP in a USB-A thumb drive form factor complete with a shell and optionally a 160x80 color LCD.

If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.

I'd trade any startup Yahoo ruined for them killing Twitter instead.

If it's conceivable that a WiFi signal isn't completely obstructed, Ubiquiti UAP-AC-M + UMA-D antenna.

If not, DIY with a couple LoRa ESP boards.