Building an e-paper status dashboard is the right project to learn how much the display technology constrains the software stack. We walk hardware choices (Pi versus ESP32), the refresh and ghosting physics that shape the design, partial-refresh strategies, ESPHome and Python options for rendering, deep sleep for months of battery life, and the enclosure and mounting decisions that make the difference.
Esp32
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Build an E-Paper Status Dashboard -
Sous Vide Is Just a PID Loop Precision cooking is control theory wearing an apron. Why water is the ideal thermal medium, what PID actually does inside an immersion circulator and why cheap ones oscillate, the pasteurization math (D-values and log reduction), thickness-based heating times, searing as a separate high-rate process, and where sous vide genuinely wins versus where it's nerd theater.
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The Aquarium as a Production System A reef tank is a bioreactor with an SLA: the nitrogen cycle as a bootstrapping dependency chain, monitoring and alerting with reef controllers or ESP32 builds, dosing pumps as closed-loop actuators, redundancy design, fail-safe plumbing topology, backup power sizing, and incident response when the workload is alive.
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ESP32 and MicroPython for the Homelab: Custom Sensors and Home Assistant Integrations from Scratch The software engineer's entry point into microcontrollers: choosing the right ESP32 variant, flashing MicroPython, wiring up real sensors, publishing to MQTT, and integrating with Home Assistant — plus when to use ESPHome instead.