I’ve thought more on this yesterday, and I think my issue is-

I don’t want something that ‘just works’, I want to BUILD something that ‘just works’

The distinction is that I don’t want to buy premade solutions. I want to make them. Not because of the customizability, but because the fun is in the building. Think Lego- hundreds of people build the exact same product in the end, but why are they sold in pieces? Just assemble the damn things and sell them complete (with markup). You think more people wanna buy that?? I’d bet against it.

That’s why I always use hexagonal windows. It never goes out of style.

Hard agree. In fact, I think there’s a market for JUST the guides. It’s true that there’s a TON of guides out there already, from old blogs to YouTube, but the issue is: all of them start or end with: “your use case might differ, so perhaps this solution isn’t for you.” Or “make sure this setup is compatible with your specific hardware”

For example: I want to set up some sort of backup/cloud storage type system. Well there’s about 1400 ways to accomplish that. I can easily just grab one and go, but I’ll always wonder- should I have done this a different way? Would my life be easier/more secure if I chose a different set up?

So offering hardware that is compatible with whatever “stack” of services included would be a huge plus. Sorta like getting a raspberry pi and following a specific raspberry pi tutorial- you know the issues you get aren’t gonna be due to incompatibility.

I think it really boils down to the scale of one’s home lab- are you just tinkering to get some skills and make something cool? Or are you hoping to do something much much bigger? Different software solutions fit those extremes differently.

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

Edit: I remember why - I wanted to use a single button dimming option, and as far as I can tell, there wasn’t that option in Shelly natively. There isn’t really a “native” version of this in Tasmota, but someone had already laid out the method to do such a thing with rules and whatnot within the Tasmota console. But after tinkering with it all this morning, I think I busted it beyond repair, so I might give the native Shelly a try!

Mostly because I’m lazy. This device was set up before Shelly made it so easy to run offline versions of the native firmware. And I’ve got a handful of devices already running Tasmota, so I’m just resistant to change.

Yeah, Tasmota has ‘setoption19’ to enable autodiscovery, and I triggered it, and it finds a whole host of SENSORS - but none of them are the switches. It does add one entity which is a single switch. But it seems this just correlates to switch1. I’m thinking it has something to do with how I originally set up the dimmer… it was years ago, so I guess I need to dig into my notes and see if I can figure out what options I set on it before I moved it to it’s current spot.

for reference, the data spit out by Tasmota: {“Time”:“2024-08-29T15:17:19”,“Switch1”:“OFF”,“Switch2”:“OFF”,“ANALOG”:{“Temperature”:35.1},“ENERGY”:{“TotalStartTime”:“2021-07-13T17:05:01”,“Total”:37178.152,“Yesterday”:0.000,“Today”:0.000,“Period”:0,“Power”:0,“ApparentPower”:0,“ReactivePower”:0,“Factor”:1.00,“Voltage”:117,“Current”:0.000},“TempUnit”:“C”}

Ooooh! Finally. I have needed something like this to control the volume on my media PC.

I used to have an automation that detects when my HVAC turns on, and it bumps the volume of whatever I’m playing up a few clicks. Then turns it back down when the HVAC cycle finishes. Super handy due to the crazy loud HVAC in my house.

Yeah, two separate drives. Do you set up bios legacy from the bios menu?

Damn, that would be perfect. I’ll give that a go. Thanks

Interesting… but that just replaces an existing step with another step. I’d like to reduce the overall steps to get to each system. And if I can’t do that, I’d at least like to switch the order to win>EOS>Deb

I’m missing your point. Do you think that moving the clocks is having an effect on the tilt of the earth? Or are you just trying to explain to me how daylength and latitude are related?

I know quite well how dark it gets in the north. I live in the north. Luckily, the sun still rises and sets at very predictable intervals. If I want to enjoy sunlight, I simply need to be awake at some point that coincides with when the sun is up.

You are also aware that not everyone works the exact same hours, right? And windows exist?

Use a different example to make the opposite point: I’d like the sun to be out for at least an hour after I get home from my “9-5”, so if the sun sets at 1700 I’m standard time, I am depressed. But in DST, I get to spend an hour in my garden.

See? The debate is stupid. Do you want more daylight in the morning or afternoon. That’s the only question. The amount of daylight is not affected by clocks.

Get ja in here, asap

Agreed. That’s why DST is best.

You are aware that the actual amount of daylight doesn’t change when we move the clocks right?

It really comes down to when you’d rather have more daylight, morning or evening.

Yeah… I’m not sure there’s anything more I can do. I’ve added the port forwarding rule to my router. As far as I know, there’s not much else to do.

Oh wow. That is a good tip. Because that could drive someone like me insane. (Un)fortunately— I know there’s an issue. Any traffic I pass through my wg vpn ends up nowhere. So I know the tragic is being redirected, but I can’t tell where or why it doesn’t make it inside my home network.

Either way, I got Tailscale to work right out the rip, so I’m just rocking that until I have more time to tinker with WG.

This is the first time I have attempted to port forward. So there is only one rule: this one. Port 5xxxx:5xxxx to the internal IP with the wg-easy docker container.

Thanks for the reply, but I’ve bailed on this project for now. I fly to Europe tomorrow, so I don’t have any extra time to tinker. I gave Tailscale a try, and it works flawlessly, so I’m not likely to try WireGuard any time soon. I’ll wait for them to try an monetize their “free plan” users.

This comment has been haunting me a bit. I have been struggling with my port forwarding in the rest of this thread, so I decided I need to investigate alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Tailscale, so I started googling. The following quote is directly from the Tailscale web-page: (emphasis mine):

“WireGuard is typically configured using the wg-quick tool. To connect two devices, you install WireGuard on each device, generate keys for each device, and then write a text configuration for each device. The configuration includes information about the device (port to listen on, private IP address, private key) and information about the peer device (public key, endpoint where the peer device can be reached, private IPs associated with the peer device). It’s straightforward, particularly for a VPN. Every pair of devices requires a configuration entry, so the total number of configuration entries grows quadratically in the number of devices if they are fully connected to each other.”

I find it odd that they would say this, if the Wireguard VPN works as you stated. Any tutorial or article regarding wireguard fails to make this discussion obvious, so I am now even a bit more confused. (still won’t solve my port forwarding issue. So I guess I’m stuck with Tailscale anyway…

EDIT: Tried from an external wifi network, same issue. I think it’s my port forwarding is broken/wrong. I can’t see the port being open from outside. Need to do some troubleshooting on that end. Any advice would be welcome.

I will try that today.

For your first question: I went to https://www.portchecktool.com/ and found that the connection is being refused. So I think this is the issue. I will have to dig in a bit more, but I do believe the answer to your 2nd and 3rd question are - yes.

Damn. That sounds perfect. That’s exactly how I was hoping it would work. But for some reason my phone won’t connect… I wonder how to troubleshoot it.