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 have a ton of east-facing windows on the back of my house. It’s a blessing or a curse depending on weather and time of day. I always dreamed about them running automatically, and eventually ordered a bunch of Z-wave controlled motorized shades. Then a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to control it all.

While I was waiting for those shades to arrive, I got a bunch of Kasa light switches so I didn’t have to sweep across the entire house to turn off all the lights every night. Turning the hallway light off after 9:45PM triggers the automation.

The rabbit hole only got bigger from there.

99.999% (or whatever) of the time cars are used to go from A to B and there’s no real thought about it. How many people do you really think make backups for purely personal storage redundancies? This feels more like grape juice and yeast kits (or whatever) from the prohibition era.

I know you’re being facetious but not gonna lie, the progression from a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy to a modern micro SD card with a practically infinitely bigger amount of storage is one of the things that blows my mind most about how much technology has evolved

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.

My great-uncle never learned how to use a computer (well, other than the TRS-80 he got before he retired). He was pretty mechanical though. Even if he probably wouldn’t understand much about how it worked, he probably would’ve appreciated 3D printing if used for a car part or something!

Now that you mention it, I did update fairly recently…

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