No problem. It would of been one response but I miss understood what you where asking for, figured it was useful information still and left it up.

What I did was flash my esp on the esp home website. You might have to give your USB permission and use a chromium based browser for the web installer to see it. Once its flashed you download esphome builder and that’s where you actually make your esp home script.

You can use the templets on the side, or download a templet and then you lable what pins do what and what’s on each pin. Esphome handles the rest, its not like working with arudino ide where you need the resources for each sensor, and the right board selected.

I know its shameful but wire up your screen, sensors and whatever else like buttons to it, and tell google ai to generates you a script, I promise it will work. Its really low stakes, everything is a templet anyways. Just make sure to note what screen/sensor/model it is.

Then all you have to do is add your ssid and password and you have it up and going, should be really easy to find in home assistant and you can then flash it over air which is nice.

I havent gotten into what making a proper home assistant graphical display looks like so I can’t help you there. But making it display text values to the 16x2 display is just pointing it at home assistant values and referencing the services you have in there.

You can also add automations inside of home assistant that chain or work with your esp home so you get a lot of flexibility in what your stuff does. One of the pages on me 16x2 display acts as a message board, where you can change the text input in home assistwnt and it will send a little message to the display, or on garbage day it sends a notification to the display and then switches to that screen page instead of time/date page it defaults to.

It kind of depends on which manufacturer you go with, each esp kind of has its own quirks and features. Some pins you can only use in high/low mode to avoid turning on some other feature or changing boot functions. Some of the olderboards pins have very specific usecases.

So I’m not sure where to point you honestly. I would start with the official documentation that the manufacturers provide you.

I also think you mistake me for someone that knows what I am doing. I want to express how simple esp home is. You can just download or use the temples in esp home builder and its literally just filling out text boxes. I’m not a read the documentation guy, my spelling and reading comprehension are horrible. I’ll follow guides off YouTube and throw errors at google and try to find a video/post about it or get googles ai to summarize it if I can’t access the site like reddit.

But like I said there are quirks for each model which you should read. My esp8266 wouldn’t boot properly if I had something in one of the pins. Some boards have specific pin outs, the xiao I have can turn any pin into anything, analog, pwm, etc. Boards have high and low states on the pins which have some secret functionality. My espc6 I can adjust the antenna range by changing the high/low state of one of the pins. Its weird stuff like that you really want to look over the manufacturers docs for.

I don’t have a real screen but I just updated my esp8266 to a xiao esp32c6 for my home assistant box. I wanted zigbe and matter access but half the things I wanted to interact with are proprietary, so I need a new hub and to rebuy a few things.

Just use esp home its stupid easy don’t really have to do anything besides point it at your pin outs and label them. You can probably buy everything you want and add on more stuff. The largest cost will be a eink display probably starting at 50usd for a tiny one, you can get esp boards in 5 packs for maybe 10 USD. But I recommend xiao just because I recently bought from them and am blown away with what feels like a premium board compared to the older ones I have. They all kind of have their own use cases and quirks, I wanted the c5 for better WiFi but the c6 came in a 3 pack for much cheaper.

I use a 16x2 LCD display you get in starter kits made for kids and just simple buttons and splurged on a decent temp sensor. Its also controls a led strip under the counter that used to be controlled with a remote but I hated using the remote. Just be careful you pretty much need a separate power source for that and to make sure the pins don’t get fried by 5v. I’ll stay awake at night thinking over if I wired it correctly even though I know I did so it feels weird trusting that because I’m an idiot.

I plan on buying a 5 pack of 1 inch oled screens and upgrading it, I just have so many other little things to buy on my list I haven’t gotten back around to finishing it.

Edit* you can also just use an old android phone the home assistant apk has a setting for it. You can also buy a pi or use a old computer, but esphome is cheaper, gives you more flexibility, and is smaller so you can design and make a smaller product and choose if you want to power it via USB or just directly wire it into something. The Xiao’s I got have battery terminals and handle charging very slowly so ive been excited to try that out.

I wouldn’t 100% trust ai to blindly copy paste whatever it gave me into my terminal, but one of the beautiful things about Linux is the ability for you to get tech help via cli.

I have older relatives that ask me for their problems with windows and I’m actually hitting dead ends with them more and more where due to lack of vocabulary on their end and suffering through windows GUI you can’t really guide someone through a fix. That and more and more I’m becoming alienated from windows and don’t know what’s going on as much anymore.

If they had Linux I could just message them and give them terminal commands and it would be a lot easier for me to diagnose and give them a handful of terminal commands to copy paste. I’d still end up googling it but I could at least make it soooo much less painless then a face call/meeting app interaction where we both don’t know what windows did on the newest update.

Also unrelated side note windows shouldn’t allow refurbishers to sell old outdated laptops with windows 11 licenses if it breaks every update due to windows shitty hardware restrictions. Its like four times a year their laptop breaks and I forget how we fix it everytime.

Decided to go with the mango 2, didn’t even know there was a second one now.

I have a mango but its kind of showing its age, what’s a decent modern one these days?

Amazon and adafruit lists it for around 120-150 USD now so yes. 200 for one with a case and charger, etc.

I don’t know what those services are they look sketch to me so that screen shot means nothing to me. Even if they are legit I doubt they will ship to me. Or if they do ship it me its going to cost 80 dollars and take 3 months.

Theres generally a reason why it’s so cheap.

If you already make a recycling run to the scrap yard its worth doing. I got 120 bucks last run just off old PCs and it wasn’t even that much, you just get more when you separate it. Aluminium cases, ram, motherboard, hard drives, CPUs. The older they are often the more they are worth, and if you are into eBay selling im sure you could make a killing. I heard even DDR 3 is coming back so who knows anymore.

Only thing you shouldn’t take is TVs you have to pay to get rid of them. Maybe don’t take appliance too. some people do, for example fridges have a few valuable components but I would not reccomend it. You end up with plastics and other junk sometimes and have to pay to get a dump run.

A lot of it only makes sense if you can store a pile until it gets big enough to be worth a trip out.

I have two spare 8th gen Intel PCs I saved from the garbage bin, and a old gaming desktop that I now use as the server. So if I need a spare server I’m probably going to use one of those. I can get USB to gpio so been thinking of trying trying that route more considering how often people get rid of old pcs. I have a stack of windows vista-7 era laptops I was going to take apart for scrap too which could be used.

I bought the pis a long time ago, each time a found a project for one I was sad I didn’t have one to play with and kept buying more. They aren’t really even in use now. Ones built in to my work station and occasionally I boot into it and use raspberry pi imager to flash ubuntu or something on a USB. Its useful to have just ready on occasion. I have a hard time getting rid of them because of use cases like that, and in have a lot of hats/accessories for them like the ai camera. Even though I’m not really going to use them like I used to anymore.

I have 3 pi 4s that where maybe 45 dollars each when I bought them, last time unchecked they where 600 dollars. I thought about selling them, but completely forgot if I want a pi again, and go to buy one, by then they might be 400 each.

What’s funny is most of the tech we use today peaked at around 1950s or in some instances much sooner. If we lost the internet, or majority of modern computers due to some disaster we wouldnt nessisarly go back to the stone ages.

We kind of already figured out how to make the best design for most technology that actually improves our lives. For fidges, dishwashers, radios, sewing machines, etc. Any little device you can think of has thousands of patents and been designed many many times over.

The only difference sense then is we learned how to manufacture things cheaper and with outsourced labor to be able to spread that technology to everyone. So that means is instead of a product that used to be made by professionals, all metal gears and parts; it now all gets made by the cheapest poccess possible. Arguably things are much worse.

Even computers, like for fuck sake it only took kilobytes of data to go to the moon. A 10 dollar esp 32 can take you to the moon if you knew what you where doing. Yet instead of making good products now we expected Moores law to carry us through bloatware like windows. Software as a service kept creeping in and consuming more power than nessisary. Most people only need to run a web browser, but windows needs 16gigs of ram to run 24/7 spyware on a device thats meant to only last 2-4 years.

Even noncomputer devices need computers in them for either the sake of DRM, SAaS, or planned obsolescence these days. So sadly in a event like a solar flare majority of the people would be sitting ducks.

I have always preached removing any internet of service device from your life as much as possible. Including cars. Sadly half the time that means you also have to learn how to repair or replace these things. Over the past 5-10 years ive been teaching myself on YouTube how to fix my own car, my own dishwasher, my phones, everything really. Mainly due to lack of expendable cash, but now it gives me some deeper meaning in some regards.

The CIA said mlk had gay boy lovers and threw gay swinger parties before they ended up killing him you idiot.

Now there is Ai that does that for the likes of peter thiel. You go out there and be the next MLK if that’s what you want to happen to you.

I don’t know what kind of world you live in the believe that. Have you ever have to fight a entity at the scale these big tech companies can afford?

You’re going to go broke and they will stall you harass you and send you endless frivolous claims to the point you cannot do anything. Even worse is they have enough money where the courts and cops are on their side.

When its over half of them, and the other half are literal natzis from south Africa or have some other kind of weird racist origin I think its pretty safe to say all of them.

Not to mention ALL of the major tech and ai companies have installed someone from unit 8200.

Its not in bad faith when the list of “good” tech ceos is under a handful.

What do you think people have been trying to do to reach the point of turning to violence.

You think that was their first option? You think its so easy then you go out there and put your money where your mouth is. I wana see you get clubbed in the head by a cop, or shot with rubber bullets point blank and pepper sprayed in the eyes. Go ahead tell me how that works out.

First show me where I said we should ban them.

Second:

If you where to leave a loaded gun out on the table, and someone where to steal it off your table you would also be held liable for the crime because it wasn’t locked away in a gun safe unloaded.

LLMs are the equivalent of handing out a loaded gun to everyone for free, even if they adamantly don’t want one. People like Sam Altmann and elon musk who keep pushing for this garbage to be your therapist and the only way to interact with life should face serious consequences like life in prison, and the companies they run should get a fine that’s impossibly large to pay off just like how infowars got a 500billion dollar fine. Info wars and chatgpt are pretty much the same product.

The LLMS convinced maybe 15+ kids to kill themselves. Claude told the us goverment to bomb a kids school.

I mean you’re kind of splitting hairs on what kind of child murder the LLMs are enabling.