HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

I’ve got a similar battery bank. It’ll turn 4 hours of capability into 12, with no issues.

Mine is a veektomx MAX65W. 20,000mah.

Just be aware of capacities. The limit is either 100Wh or 160Wh depending on the airline. That works out at 27,000mah or 43,250mah respectively. Most power banks are below this, but not all.

Depressingly, that’s around 2x the cost/Tb.

I personally make use of the sonoff pow smart plugs, with Tasmota firmware. Though any Tasmota compatible smart plug with power readings will work.

The key thing is that with Tasmota, you can properly calibrate the readings. I have a friend with a high quality power meter. I used that to calibrate my smart plugs, they seem to track within a few % of the expensive one, once calibrated.

Depending on if you have access to an expensive meter or not, this will either be the best bet, or completely useless to you. Your local Hackspace might also be a good option for getting your hands on an expensive meter for an evening.

There’s nothing for a ground pin to be connected to, the case is plastic.

The bigger issue is that a lot of light switches also lack a neutral connection. They have live, and switched live. You can get devices to allow them to scavenge power, but they can also cause led bulbs to glow dimly.

I often use the acronym WAF, Wife Acceptance Factor.

Basically I need to make sure that all household setups can work completely dumb, with the central server having crashed.

So far, so good.

Just because 1 department is being lazy doesn’t mean their legal aren’t.

Lazy would be a better description. They want the tech cred of having it be an IoT device. They also hope to leverage it to get more money. Unfortunately, the budget, and coherent drive for this isn’t there. The end result is a “designed by committee” app. It ticks all the boxes, but also misses all the things that would help actually get people using it.

Some are actually welcoming, and provide a local API. That way your air-conditioning control isn’t web dependent.

Unfortunately, most are quite stupid about it, and insist on using their app. This voids any usefulness of having smart appliances. E.g. pulse a light in a room when the tumble dryer finishes or turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar’s output.

Z2M, and it was definitely routing via the bulb. The ZigBee dimmer unit couldn’t reach the coordinator directly (I might have mounted it in a metal wall box, with a metal front plate). It was connecting to the bulb and working fine however. When the bulb was off, the dimmer completely lost connectivity.

It might only be some of their bulbs, but they can definitely act as repeaters.

They definitely are repeaters. I had issues with a Moe’s ZigBee dimmer. It turned out it was relaying off of an IKEA bulb. When that lamp got turned off at the switch, it killed the link. I ended up using a smart plug as a repeater.

I would also note they have a PoE version as well. It’s quite handy to minimise congestion on your WiFi, and not have to worry about batteries.

Both work well with various home automation systems.

3D printers are ubiquitous in the maker community already. They have also already become a staple of small industry too. The various attempts at regulation will go nowhere. There’s no support from anyone who understands the tech.

This is compounded by the fact that a number of elements are unwanted in the community. The guys trying to push gun designs etc are like the guys who turn up to a kids party wearing body armour and carrying an assult rifle. They might have the right to do it, but they can’t then complain that the other parents want nothing to do with them. The community seems to self police remarkably well.

The big issue with 3D print designs isn’t the big companies protecting parts. They don’t seem to bother. The issue is that parts are not standardized. A particular part in, say, a dishwasher, will change slightly, from model to model. It also takes a reasonable skill baseline to reverse engineer a broken part to a 3D printable design. The results are also often also a hacky bodge job. I’ve done it before, and my goal is to fix the issue and move on. This creates a lack of models available, in the first place, paid or free.

On top of this, most paid model makers are small time artists selling their own design. With piracy, it’s the difference between stealing a TV from Walmart, and stealing it from a guy down the street, trying to save money to take his kids on holiday.

There are a few exceptions. Games Workshop are a big one. They are very hot on defending their copyright on model designs. Their business model relies on selling a few, high profit items, rather than a lot of cheap ones. 3D printers can undercut that significantly.

On the whole, however, the 3D printing community is extremely functional. This makes piracy quite a niche thing. There’s a lot of free designs already, and those that are charging, aren’t being unreasonable. It might change with time, but for now it’s working well.

Yes I did. Autocorrect decided to “help”. Apparently the edit I made hasn’t propagated through.

I migrated on to a NUC. They seem to have the right mix of performance and power efficiency, for me. The i3 processor also means you’re not dealing with the extra complexity of Arm64.

Our personalities are just a series of habits we have built up. Ultimately, my monkey brain doesn’t really understand that the voice it is talking to doesn’t belong to a real person. If I get into the habit of being rude, that will spill over into my interactions with real humans. It’s honestly less effort to be polite to an AI than to be rude to an AI, but polite to fellow humans.

I will admit though, I do sometimes drop into dog training mode. Short, clear commands with controlled tone. It improves reliability, but requires more mental effort. I generally wouldn’t use them to a real person, outside of emergency situations. Overriding this uses mental effort.