A $67 Guition JC8012P4A1C turned into a Home Assistant wall panel with ESPHome and LVGL. The newest batch needed a patched display driver to stop a boot loop, and the touchscreen stayed dead through three drivers and two firmware tables until I unplugged it from the dock.
weewx runs exactly one station driver. I wanted the Vevor station’s data and an indoor sensor that only exists as MQTT messages from rtl_433. weewx-metadriver runs both drivers side by side, and an old MQTT driver needed a rewrite before it would work with weewx 5 and paho-mqtt 2.
A Vevor weather station that can only upload to Weather Underground, a Raspberry Pi 3 pretending to be wunderground.com on its own isolated wifi network, and weewx-interceptor catching the data. Plus the WPA2 handshake that failed nine times out of ten, and the console clock that was an hour fast.
My GPS-disciplined time server dropped off the network and I didn’t find out for 24 days. The cause wasn’t the hardware, and it wasn’t what I assumed twice along the way — it was a permanent DNS record aimed at an address the router was free to hand to somebody else.
lm-sensors’ nct6683 driver silently refused to bind on a Lenovo M900 Tiny running Proxmox — no error, just no fan data. The cause was a vendor/build check in the driver tripping on this box’s EC firmware, and the fix was a one-line force=1 module param made persistent.
A small Proxmox cluster, a managed switch or two, some IP cameras, and Home Assistant eventually stop being a pile of gadgets and start being infrastructure. Here’s how I built observability, a live topology graph, and an AI-assisted ops layer for mine — without letting anything have unsupervised write access to the network.