Adventures In Home Automation #2: The Correct Way To Do Something Is The Way That Works

Oh, boy, did I have a fun time this weekend and vacation period getting things set up and trying to make my home automation more powerful and better able to respond to requests from the household. Two stellar examples emerge of problem-solving, scratching my head at the documentation, and trying things iteratively until something worked the way I intended it to. I feel like this is something I should be taking more pride in, since they were both successful, but mostly what's come out of them has been feelings of embarrassment at it taking this long, or that the solution that I've hit upon is probably Ugly and Wrong, or disbelief that I managed to make it work at all, since they look so long and so much effort to do. So, I'm laying these examples out for you, partly as a bid for your opinions on the matter so that I can recalibrate reality against brainweasels, and partly because I want to document that these things really did end up working.

( Example 1: The TV and the Pi )

( Example 2: The Sensor Screensaver Bash-Together (in Python) )

And those are two examples of Adventures in Home Automation (and its related functions), both of which required skills, problem-solving, consultation of the documentation, and iterative design until they worked correctly. If nothing else, I hope they were entertaining stories.