Back in 2021, I wired up data from Buienalarm and Buienradar through Node-RED and a big pile of Jinja2 templates to get a rain forecast graph on my Apple Watch: eight Unicode block characters showing the next two hours in 15-minute chunks, glanceable without unlocking the phone. It worked, and I used it every day […] The post Buienwatch, a custom Home Assistant integration for Buienradar and Buienalarm graphs on your Apple Watch appeared first on Style over Substance.

Dithering is one of those techniques that feels like it belongs in a museum. It peaked in the ’90s, the era of 256-color palettes and early computer graphics, when you needed to trick the eye into seeing colors that your hardware couldn’t actually produce. Now, even our phones have OLED displays that do HDR, and […] The post Dithering is obsolete (except when it isn’t); creating OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.

Last year I wrote about how I had written an ESPHome configuration for the Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 device to work as a small, color, digital art frame. This year, I wrote about how I had been using Claude Code to help me write Home Assistant code for myself. Those efforts have now combined in […] The post Black and white epaper photo frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1003 using ESPHome and Home Assistant appeared first on Style over Substance.

For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with Claude Code. Not in a “no one needs developers anymore, anyone can build apps now” kind of way. More in a “I have a basic understanding of this, but not enough to turn it into code I can actually use” kind of way. I don’t need […] The post Using Claude Code to write Home Assistant integrations appeared first on Style over Substance.

For the last month, I’ve been experimenting with making a digital art frame based on color epaper. Spectra 6 is the latest color epaper tech available, offering 6 colors (black, white, red, green, blue, yellow) in brighter and more saturated tones then its predecessors. And with these color panels becoming more available and affordable now, […] The post Epaper digital art frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 display and IKEA RÖDALM using ESPHome and Home Assistant appeared first on Style over Substance.