I’ve been running an ESP32 NodeMCU in the bedroom for motion, temperature, and humidity for a while and have wanted to extend it’s functionality by adding light sensing too, in order to improve the motion light control to trigger when the lux is a certain level vs the current functional, but limited mode based on the position of the sun.

I was an avid user of custom ROMs for my Android phones when vendors used to stop providing updates or included too much bloat with their releases. However that stopped when I got a Moto X4 which was for me the right balance and it performed well.

I noticed that the Pi3 that had been hosting our Home Assistant setup along with a minimal set of addons was really struggling which came apparent with things not being as stable as they should and often requiring reboots.

A couple of months ago our old single drive WD My Cloud Home NAS died. The HDD failed and even shucking the device and trying to connect with a SATA adaptor failed to read the drive. Thankfully nothing important was lost as that was all backed up off site.

My Home Assistant setup recently died due to the SDCard finally giving up after 3 years of continual use. Thankfully I had a relatively recent snapshot of my setup so getting up and running again was mostly painless. However this time I invested in an SSD and converting my setup to boot from that.