Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security Deposit)

Re:Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security ... by daniel5151 on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @05:39PM (#49103418)

Oh, hey, I'm the author!

Happy to answer any questions :)

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Re:Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security ... by LittleLily on Thursday July 30, 2026 @01:13AM (#49106312)

Any reason why you didn't just use ESPHome for the firmware?

It even has a component specifically for the ULN2003 stepper motor driver you were using

https://esphome.io/components/stepper/#uln2003-component

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Re:Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security ... by daniel5151 on Thursday July 30, 2026 @08:44AM (#49109241)

Truth be told, while I had known about ESPHome while working on this project, for some reason, I just felt the urge to hack together my own firmware.

It might've been because my early testing was done via an old Arduino Uno board, and I must've figured that I might as well port the sketch over to the ESP32 once I had it working.

(I'm general though, I will say that LLMs can totally write bespoke one-off firmwares like this, and I don't feel too bad about it, given that it's running entirely within my LAN, and will never actually get "productized")

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