[HN Gopher] Building an IoT Notification Device from Scratch
___________________________________________________________________
Building an IoT Notification Device from Scratch
Author : bertwagner
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-10-01 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bertwagner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bertwagner.com)
| bertwagner wrote:
| Author here. Thanks for reading. This was a massive learning
| project for me, I'm happy to answer questions or feedback.
| cstuder wrote:
| FYI: A couple of the images down in the article are not loading
| (And later some seem to be incorrectly formatted). I'm
| especially looking forward to the exploded button.
| bertwagner wrote:
| D'oh. Thank you for letting me know. All fixed now. Hopefully
| "exploded button" wasn't too misleading (more of an exploded
| view of the design).
| auspiv wrote:
| bro your images are giant. every load of the page is
| transferring 40ish MB. back_panel_back_render.png is 11.3
| MB. replace those with smaller versions and click to link
| to the larger.. but I do see both cloudfront and cloudflare
| headers so not sure why these aren't being cached by them
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| They probably need the origin server to set the right
| cache headers, otherwise the cdn would get blamed for
| stale images
| bertwagner wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know, I will have to fix this soon.
| This was the first post as part of a new blogging setup
| I'm using and clearly I'm missing some of my old
| processes (like image resizing).
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| They are photographic images saved as PNG, which is
| lossless and intended for digitally created images with
| large areas of pixels with the exact same value. Please
| use a format intended for photographic images.
| Splashflag.png is 4.5 MB, it's 10.5 MB as an uncompressed
| BMP file, but only 600 KB as a JPEG with
| indistinguishable quality loss.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Almost Name Twin here (brett wagner) just saying hey.
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is wonderful! Thanks for sharing!!
| Havoc wrote:
| The entire ESP ecosystem is quite accessible for people of modest
| technical ability.
|
| HomeAssistant+ ESPHome + ESP32 in particular is a good stack
| because it takes away most of the complexity. Common sensors have
| ESPHome code available with a quick google so just need to
| connect the wires right basically
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Indeed about ESP32 being approachable. I particularly enjoyed
| finding and messing about with the Cheap Yellow Display. It's a
| fun little platform and with LVGL making it pretty is a joy.
|
| Would have been a nicer fit (smaller bevel) than the LCD in
| this project at about the same cost.
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| Problem is that ESP32s are super power hungry once you start
| using BLE or Wifi.
|
| For BLE you can use STM32s and Nordics. But Wifi-on-Chip is
| ESP32-only.
| aksss wrote:
| BLE and WiFi are power hungry on any platform. LoRaWAN or
| zigbee are better for low power, low bw comms. Kinda
| sacrifice simplicity & ubiquity of support in that you need a
| gateway/router of some sort, but they are solid solutions
| with long range and high penetration.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| If you want to avoid "long polling" then MQTT isn't the answer
| (it's still a long held TCP connection waiting for messages). UDP
| would be the way to go, and with WireGuard as a carrier you don't
| have to worry about NAT traversal issues (and get privacy as a
| bonus).
|
| Love the project - would have been great when my kiddos were that
| age.
| bertwagner wrote:
| Thank you and I'm glad you enjoy the project. I'll have to look
| more into UDP for this type of solution.
| petesoper wrote:
| When I got to auto[ssid, etc in main.c it became clear the
| sophistication/excursion from the typical Esp32 code centerline
| is at many levels. Thanks for sharing!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-01 23:01 UTC)