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Man. back in the day where you got these big ass catalogs and would look at all of the cool crap you had no way to afford. A family member was into all kinds of stuff like this. They had a wrist watch that you could program phone numbers into and use it as a phone book.. Because you know, phones work off tones. You would just select a name and hold the watch near the receiver and it would dial for you. Cool shit when it was back in the 1990's.

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From the post: "Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world.

I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for you. And from the fact that you’re reading this blog at all, I think you may be a lot like me."

Paging @stupidbird Man. back in the day where you got these big ass catalogs and would look at all of the cool crap you had no way to afford. A family member was into all kinds of stuff like this. They had a wrist watch that you could program phone numbers into and use it as a phone book.. Because you know, phones work off tones. You would just select a name and hold the watch near the receiver and it would dial for you. Cool shit when it was back in the 1990's. Archive: https://archive.today/T8XnW From the post: "Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world. I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for you. And from the fact that you’re reading this blog at all, I think you may be a lot like me."

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[–] • 1 pt

I still use it, it's controlled by a serial controller running custom scripts on a Pi. It's still just as noisy, but I don't mind it. I appreciate that I can hear when a light is being turned on automatically.

The remote is cool, it's ultrasonic instead of IR.

[–] • 1 pt

Its neat but Im just glad to have some of the new stuff with status, power monitoring, etc.. I build some custom modules with ESPHome now too. Really handy.

[–] • 1 pt

I tried ESP modules. The raw modules you get from vendors have a massive RF spur at 319.98MHz, which is just close enough to 320MHz that it kills other devices I have.

I've got couple of doodads that use ESP modules, and they don't do that. I wonder if there's something about the firmware that's not custom to a device causing that.

[–] • 1 pt

Good question. Ive not really done much to tinker with the frequency side of things. Maybe trying other firmware's would be worth a shot.

[–] • 0 pt

I tried ESP modules. The raw modules you get from vendors have a massive RF spur at 319.98MHz, which is just close enough to 320MHz that it kills other devices I have.

I wonder if there's something about the firmware that's not custom to a device causing that.

Cheap chinese garbage with noisy RF sections. I bet if you check one of these problem causing units with a RF spectrum analyzer, you would discover it is emitting a lot of noisy sideband garbage RF and probably has some whistles at various harmonics. I don't think it's the firmware when the RF section is made so poorly that it would easily be the cause.