Believe it or not, self-hosting! I went from renting a VPS for $40 a month, to purchasing an entire $150 machine at home, plus $50 or so in additional storage, plus a $20 a month VPS solely to bypass NAT restrictions... plus a few hundred dollars more when I first started, because I cheaped out on components and managed to brick not one, but two Intel BIOSes trying to update them.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Mine is pretty basic but is built on the shoulders of giants. Also that $20 was from pre-pandemic / pre-chip shortage prices. I'm guessing it's more like $35 now, or maybe high $20s from ali express.
I use Home Assistant for home automation. It has a now official addon called ESPHome for easily configuring esp devices and adding them to Home Assistant.
- I bought some cheap dev boards off amazon and thankfully they worked
- an esp8266 microcontroller with IC2 headers and a microusb port already onboard
- a bmp280 that measures temp, humidity, and barometric pressure
- a lux sensor with a plastic dome over the top
- I soldered them together on a prototyping board
All the components were supported by esphome, so I just needed to write the device config and then flash the devboard via esphome (in a web browser) over the built in usb.
I 3d printed a housing for it, but you can also buy boxes. It needs airflow but also needs to stay dry. You can use a spray sealant to help avoid corrosion from ambient humidity. I skipped that step because I want to see how quickly it becomes problematic... and I should probably check on that.
That moment when your hobbies are most of the comments. Running, biking, camping, computers and photography (haven't spent any money on this yet so we good) :/