It has been 7 months since my last re-homing Home Assistant article. In the time since, I've re-homed it twice more, and it seemed worth making a few notes. At this point, it's fair to say my Home Assistant install is more of a vagabond, constantly searching for warm (but not too warm!) hardware to inhabit in the night...
Last fall, I had considered setting up multiple instances of Klipper on a single machine. I ultimately went with a dedicated SBC for each printer, though, mainly for resilency, but also because I dreaded writing the udev rules for the can interfaces.
Nary a month on the heels of my writing about the Radxa Zero 2 Pro, I'm delighted to report I've received the Radxa Zero 3w. Setup couldn't have been easier—in just over a week, I managed to find and install an operating system.
The week before last, I won the sbc lottery. I happened onto the allnet website during the brief moment when the Radxa Zero 2 Pro was available. I ordered 2. They arrived in record time, exceeding their estimated delivery by half a week.
This summer, I overhauled my blinds, upgrading the nodemcus to Xiao esp32c3s so I could run the more modern version of Tasmota on them, and start testing out matter. It worked really well (I think I had procrastinated upgrading because of the costs of esp32, but it's gotten so much cheaper now than it was a couple of years ago). Which got me thinking: could I install a zigbee chip on one of my blinds and use zigbee2tasmota to expose them over matter, thus eliminating HomeAssistant? I installed z2t and was surprised at how well it worked with my lights, but the berry scripts to expose zigbee endpoints aren't done yet. (It is on the road map so I'll definitely keep an eye on it as the project develops.)
The world of single board computing is alive right now. Like Julie Andrews spinning on a grassy hilltop, if you're willing to go down the rabbit hole, you'll might come out singing. The 'chip shortage' of the past few years has left many people (myself included) a lot more willing to experiment than they might otherwise have been. Internet sentiment evidences a community that is a strange mix of excited, annoyed (the comments on this article), and somewhat unsettled. I can't wait to see what another year or two brings as people respond to what's going on in this space.