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I have a SensorPush outdoor temperature/pressure/humidity sensor that I’m pretty happy with. It’s BLE, it’s reliable, its range is good, it seems pretty accurate. However it doesn’t report its battery level in its adverts, but the manufacturer app can read this level through reading GATT characteristics. I previously had a go at adding this to my HA two years ago. It worked for a while, but the distance between my desktop at the front of the house, and the sensor in the back garden became too far when I tried to protect the sensor from the sun with more aluminium foil.

Using a desktop for this always felt a little over-engineered, so moving back to the UK has given me an excuse to try it again with ESPhome.

I have a grage door.

It has an opener.

I am slightly too lazy to wire up the external controls of my garage door opener.

But it does have an app, and the app shows the state of the door opening and closing.

Using the esp32_ble_tracker and some debugging ESP_LOGDs, we can see:

[19:25:28][D][ble_adv:060]: Advertised manufacturer data:
[19:25:36][D][ble_adv:062]:   - 02026d200000: (length 6)
[19:25:36][D][ble_adv:062]:   - 13c000000000000000e489feb375b43104: (length 17)

This is actually a single long advert sequence (that I forgot to keep an example of) that is type-length decoded to these two separate manufacturing messages. The manufacturing ID is set to 0x07B4 for both.

Well I’m finally settled back in the UK again! The blog hasn’t been top of my list but I’m shaking the dust off.

The first thing of course is that Hugo has updated, and broken the theme I’m using. This means either a new theme or bodging off the existing one. Naturally incurring the technical debt is the default quick fix so I can write some stuff again!

💀💀💀

Suggestions for new themes or possibly a new static layout engine that is less fragile would be appreciated.

I tried running Hypertellurians again. I’d run a game online with people I sort-of-knew during COVID, and this time my normal gaming crew had a gap between campaigns.

I’ll just drop this in, with only a little prep. I know what happens. It’s a simple system. What could go wrong?

Reader, lots.

My wife asked for a sensor that would inform her of the next bus here in Ottawa. Turns out they have an actual API! Someone had tried this on the forums before but said the API had changed¹.

I’m pretty happy with my SensorPush outdoor temperature/humidity/pressure sensor. It’s not cheap but it is calibrated to work in a Canadian winter (most of it, at least). Their BLE adverts are automatically detected by HomeAssistant and decoded.

Sometimes it appears to have a bit of a nap, adverts stop arriving (and I’ve checked with other BLE receivers) until the Android app wakes it up, probably the direct Bluetooth connection is all it wants.

Also, the battery voltage doesn’t appear to be broadcast. SensorPush do actually publish an API but they only show the GATT characteristics that require active scanning. Also my readings don’t agree with their statement that I can read battery temperature. The Android app happily returns 20.9C (which seems high!), raw values seem to float around 0xffff.

So, rather than try to get an ESP32 to lock up its active connection, draining the battery to see how quickly the battery is draining, I’m going for something more intermittent.

A nerd friend bought me a LILYGO E-paper display¹, in the exact hope that I’d end up going down the rabbit hole of Smart Things. I have gone down this bloody rabbit hole. I’ve always been a sucker for data, and I aspire to heating my home more efficiently by measuring temperatures round the house and seeing how they change as I change demand.

This is not a place of honour. It’s a place of a lot of YAML and black magic. It’s pretty cool when it works though:

• The board is a micro with Wi-Fi and a big-enough E-Paper Display (EPD)
• I can reconfigure it via context-aware text editor in the browser
• Push updates (also from the browser)
• Do some reasonably complex data processing and image/text rastering on the micro itself
• Control it from either a self-hosted server on the micro or from Home Assistant

This ends a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance. I’m actually writing this in 2025, but leaving it dated when the campaign finished.

I finally got burnt out running this campaign, and the players and I decided we’d stop. We had a closing session and discussed what the characters would go on to do:

• Joshua wants to operate the island and travel onward
• Emmett wants to improve relations between the PPs and Lime Nomads, and the last serai criminal gang
  • He says he’s a pragmatist
• Joshua would resurrect Lateria too if possible

Lessons learned

This campaign became more about trading favours not actual goods or gold. The players weren’t too fussed about finding good trade routes, or combat particularly.

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.

Emmett & Joshua are exploring a brand new mystery island in the Cirle Sea. They’ve landed with Spiral and his servant, and are in an abandoned village. Strange and wondrous things exist here, but the only person is Tim, who thinks they’re the other side of the Circle Sea.

He’s also reporting being chased by mysterious creatures.

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.

Emmett & Joshua are exploring a brand new mystery island in the Cirle Sea. They’ve landed with Spiral and his servant, and are in an abandoned village.