Reliving VHS Memories With NFC And ESPHome

July 3, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Like many of us of a certain vintage, [Dillan Stock] at The Stock Pot is nostalgic for VHS tapes. It’s not so much the fuzzy picture or the tracking issues we miss, but the physical experience the physical medium brought to movie night. To recreate that magic, [Dillan] made a Modern VHS with NFC and ESPHome.

NFC tags are contained in handsomely designed 3D printed cartridges. You can tell [Dillan] put quite a bit of thought into the industrial design of these: there’s something delightfully Atari-like about them, but they have the correct aspect ratio to hold a miniaturized movie poster as a label. They’re designed to print in two pieces (no plastic wasted on supports) and snap together without glue. The printed reader is equally well thought out, with print-in-place springs for that all important analog clunk.

Electronically, the reader is almost as simple as the cartridge: it holds the NFC reader board and an ESP32. This is very similar to NFC-based audio players we’ve featured before, but it differs in the programming. Here, the ESP32 does nothing related directly to playing media: it is simply programmed to forward the NFC tag id to ESPHome. Based on that tag ID, ESPHome can turn on the TV, cue the appropriate media from a Plex server (or elsewhere), or do… well, literally anything. It’s ESPHome; if you wanted to make this and have a cartridge to start your coffee maker, you could.

If this tickles your nostalgia bone, [Dillan] has links to all the code, 3D files and even the label templates on his site. If you’re not sold yet, check out the video below and you might just change your mind. We’ve seen hacks from The Stock Pot before, everything from a rebuilt lamp to an elegant downspout and a universal remote.

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How A DIY Chicken Coop Door Opener Went From Simple To Complex

June 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out with, after three years of using a more basic off-the-shelf unit that offered no remote access nor a convenient user interface. The use case for [Jeff] was rather straightforward: the door would be open during the day and closed at night to keep the hens safely inside the coop.

The commercial solution offered an RTC-backed programmable interface as well as a light sensor, but the latter wasn’t always reliable in inclement weather and making simple changes to the programming when e.g. the hens had to stay inside a day due to work on the yard, was much more complicated than needed, plus had to be done on the spot. The new system would solve all these ills.

That said, the existing door mechanism was doing a fine job and could be kept. This just left making a new box with electronics to control it, starting with an ESP32C3 with the ESPHome firmware that is hooked into the local Home Assistant system, along with a motor to lift and lower the door and with magnetic contact sensors.

So far so easy. The hard part came with the installation, which involved trenching to the hen house for mains power, repairing the damage from this, and troubleshooting a power issue that turned out to be due to a dodgy power adapter. The payoff is that now the chicken coop is also part of the smart home and their owner never has to trudge through a soggy garden again to adjust the programming on a dim LC display with far too few buttons.

PoE-Power Protection: The Hornet Nest Alarm Panel

January 4, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 31 Comments

Have you ever thought of giving new buzz to outdated wired alarm systems or saving money while upgrading your home security? The Hornet Nest Alarm Panel, to which hacker [Patrick van Oosterwijck] contributes, does just that. Designed for domotics enthusiasts, it offers 42 sensor zones and seamless integration with Home Assistant and ESPHome. This open-source gem uses the wESP32 board, which combines an ESP32 with Ethernet and Power over Ethernet (PoE) for robust, reliable connectivity. Check out the Crowd Supply campaign for details.

So what makes this Hornet Nest special? Besides its hackable nature, it repurposes existing wired sensors, reducing waste and cost. Unlike WiFi-dependent solutions, the PoE-powered ESP32 ensures stable performance, even in hard-to-reach locations. The optional USB programming port is genius—it’s there when you need it but doesn’t clutter the board when you don’t. With its isolated circuits, long-cable safety, and smart Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth combination, this system ticks every DIY box.

Hackaday has featured other DIY PoE-powered projects, offering more inspiration for smart automation enthusiasts.

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ESP8266 Keeps Tabs On Wood Stove Temperature

December 15, 2024 by Tom Nardi 36 Comments

Wood heat offers unique advantages compared to more modern heating systems, especially in remote areas. But it also comes with its own challenges, namely, keeping the fire going at the optimum temperature. If it’s too cold you risk buildup in the chimney, but if you’ve got it stoked up more than necessary, you’ll end up burning through your wood faster.

To keep the fire in that sweet spot, [Jay] decided to put an ESP8266 and a thermocouple to work. Now, this might seem like an easy enough job at first, but things are complicated by the fact that the flue temperature above the stove lags considerably behind the temperature inside the stove. There’s also the fact that the top of the chimney will end up being much colder than the bottom.

Mounting the thermocouple in the flue pipe.

In an effort to get a more complete view of what’s happening, [Jay] plans on putting at least two thermocouples in the chimney. But as getting on the roof in December isn’t his idea of fun, for now, he’s starting with the lower one that’s mounted right above the stove. He popped a hole in the pipe to screw in a standard K-type probe, and tapped it a few times with the welder to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere.

From there, the thermocople connects to a MAX6675 amplifier, and then to the WeMos D1 Mini development board that’s been flashed with ESPHome. [Jay] provides the configuration file that will get the flue temperature into Home Assistant, as well as set up notifications for various temperature events. The whole thing goes into a 3D printed box, and gets mounted behind the stove.

This project is a great example on how you can get some real-world data into Home Assistant quickly and easily. In the future, [Jay] not only wants to add that second thermocouple, but also look into manipulating the stove’s air controls with a linear actuator. Here’s hoping we get an update as his woodstove learns some new tricks.

Make A Cheap Robot Mower Much Smarter

July 2, 2024 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The Parkside range of tools as sold in European Lidl stores may be reasonably priced, but it contains some products of far better quality than their modest cost would suggest. This means that Parkside hacking has become as much of a cottage industry as IKEA hacking, and they’re a firm favorite for modifications. [Lambertus] has taken a Parkside robot mower, and converted it from a relatively mundane device to a fully-connected smart robot, with the aid of an ESP8266.

The hardware is surprisingly simple, as all that’s really needed is a stop/go command. This can be readily found by hooking up to the input from the mower’s rain sensor, allowing the ESP to control its operation. Then there’s an accelerometer to allow it to count motion, and a hookup tot he battery to measure voltage. The firmware uses ESPHome, resulting in a mower now connected to home automation.

This isn’t the first time we’ve shown you someone upgrading the smarts on robot mover, and of course we’ve also taken a tour through the history of lawn mowers in general.

Bed Sensors Do More Than You’d Think

December 21, 2023 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

Bed sensors do sort of sound like a gimmick — after all, who cares whether someone is occupying the bed? But if you think about it, that information is quite useful from a home automation standpoint. A person could do all sorts of things in this state, from ensuring the overhead lights in the room can’t come on, to turning off other smart devices that are likely not being used while both occupants are sleeping.

[The Home Automation Guy] presents a couple of ways of doing this, but both center around a fairly inexpensive pressure-sensing mat.

In the first method, he connects the pressure mat up to a Zigbee Aqara Leak Sensor, which conveniently has two terminals on the back to accept the wires from the pressure sensor. Then he simply connects it up to a Zigbee-compatible home assistant like the Aqara Hub.

In slightly harder mode, he forgoes the Aqara Leak Sensor and connects the pressure mat up to an ESP32 using a nifty screw terminal dev board. Then he sets up the sensor and all the desired actions in ESPHome. Of course, with an ESP32, it’s easy to add a second pressure mat for [Mrs. The Home Automation Guy]’s side of the bed.

Now, once they’ve both gone off to bed, the house goes into night mode — all the smart plugs, Sonos devices, and other things are powered down, and the alarm system is put into night mode. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

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2023 Hackaday Prize: A Smart Powermeter That You Actually Want

July 24, 2023 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

[Jon] wanted to keep track of his home power use, but didn’t want to have to push his data up to some cloud service that’s just going to leave him high and dry in the future. So he went completely DIY.

This simple and sweet build is now in its third revision, and the refinements show. A first prototype was nothing more than an ESP32 with a screen and some current transformer (CT) sensors to read the current flowing in the wires in his breaker box. The next version added a PCB and a color screen, and the most recent version swapped up to eInk and a nice local power supply, all sized to fit a nice clear power box.

What’s really cute about this design is the use of standard ~~phono~~ headphone jacks to plug the CT sensors into, and the overall sweet combination of a local display and interactivity with [Jon]’s ESPHome-based home automation setup. This design isn’t super complicated, but it doesn’t need to be. It has one job, and it does it nicely. What more do you want?

If you’re interested in getting into ESPHome and/or home automation, check out this great ESPHome resource. It’s probably a lot easier than you think, and you can build your system out one module at a time. If you’re like us, once you get started, you’ll find it hard to stop until everything falls under your watchful eyes, if not your control.