the bill · part three

Room by Room

The nursery, the kitchen, the front of the house, and the deck — where the system actually touches daily life.

The Nursery

comfort data, never a medical device

Ground rule, stated once: these sensors report room comfort — temperature, humidity, air, noise. They make no health claims and stay architecturally separate from Noctling's feeding logic. Reference bands: 68–72°F, 30–50% RH.

The kit

AirGradient ONE, self-assembly kit ($138) — open firmware, local HTTP API, official HA integration; temp, humidity, CO₂, PM2.5, VOC in one box, and an evening of soldering that was chosen on purpose. Plus a ~$15 ESPHome sound-level node for ambient dB and an Aqara FP2 (~$80) for presence-with-stillness — the sensor that makes nap-aware hush possible.

  • Data path: sensors → HA → a small hub job → Supabase (its own room_conditions table) → a room card in Noctling beside the timeline. The ecobee SmartSensor's reading joins it via the local HomeKit path.
  • Deliberately skipped: subscription cloud baby-cams. If camera awareness ever matters, a local RTSP camera + Frigate on the hub does it without renting reassurance.
  • If the kit loses its appeal: the value tier is the Qingping Air Monitor Lite (~$70) — real NDIR CO₂, HomeKit-local into HA, half the metrics; the tinker tier is the Apollo AIR-1 ($90–150), native ESPHome. The AirGradient stays the pick for one-box coverage plus the local API.

The Kitchen

the printer · the morning slip

The pick

WiFi thermal printer on the counter — MUNBYN ITPP047 WiFi ($140 on sale) as the native-wireless route, or a $65 refurb Epson TM-T20II (eBay) behind a small WiFi bridge. ESC/POS over the network, driven by python-escpos from the hub; the print service gets a wake-and-retry loop because WiFi printers doze, and the future UniFi 2.4GHz network is the cure. Paper: phenol-free rolls only (~$30/50-pack) — small hands will hold these slips.

  • The morning slip — the reason it exists: 7am, the day prints itself. Weather off the Tempest, calendar, todos, and Walter's overnight log with feeding intervals, flagged bold if any gap ran close. A physical handoff for whoever's on shift, QR back to the app.
  • The todo ticket: an MQTT topic + HTTP endpoint means a phone Shortcut, n8n, or Claude can push a tear-off list to the counter from anywhere.
  • The tiers: buy-once is the Epson TM-T20III ($250–330) — the POS-world workhorse, decades of driver sanity; value is the MUNBYN (~$110, native WiFi); budget-prove-the-idea is the $65 refurb TM-T20II. All speak the same ESC/POS, so the software never changes when the printer does.

Outside

two on the brick, two in the soffit · switches, not bulbs

The plan (~$145)

Inovelli Blue 2-1 switches — one for the porch's single-pole pair, one plus a $25 Aux for the driveway's 3-way — running clean on neutrals fished down from the attic during the open-attic window (14/3 on a 15A lighting circuit; match the breaker, not more). Native Zigbee2MQTT, full energy monitoring, dumb weather-rated bulbs stay in the fixtures, manual override stays at the wall.

  • Why switches: enclosed exterior fixtures cook or freeze smart bulbs past their ratings, and one flip of a wall switch turns any smart bulb dumb. The rectangular soffit units were never a bulb-retrofit target anyway.
  • What it composes: dusk-to-dawn from sun elevation (or the Tempest's actual lux), a driveway motion sensor later, arrive-home lighting, and the tornado tier flashing the exteriors for anyone outside.

The Pit

reconnect the recteq · instrument around it

  • The reconnect (once coverage exists): dedicated 2.4GHz SSID, phone on the same band with Bluetooth + Local Network + Location allowed, WPA2/WPA3-mixed — and recteq support's own trick of pairing from the yard at 1–2 bars. The honest fix is coverage: the deck is a dead zone until the outdoor AP goes up; a relocated Deco is the interim bar of signal.
  • Don't build on recteq's cloud — it's closed, undocumented, and its one community integration died years ago. The app is for glancing; the instrumentation is for real.
  • The instrument: a Combustion Inc predictive thermometer (BLE/MeatNet, solid community HA integration) in the meat — live cook dashboard on the LAN, and the Sonos announcing the stall break off rate-of-rise, politely, never during quiet hours. A MeatNet repeater covers the deck-to-hub distance if needed.