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. Plus a new layer at the door: the house learning who's home, who's asleep, and whose turn it is.

On this page

The Rundown

11 items · ≈$900 ($265 of it someday) · updated jul 18 2026

  • ◆ decided Nursery's comfort panel — AirGradient ONE kit, sound node, and Aqara FP2 (~$233) — stays data-only, architecturally separate from Noctling's feeding logic.
  • ◆ decided The kitchen printer (MUNBYN WiFi, ~$140) keeps printing the 7am morning slip — weather, todos, and the overnight feeding log.
  • ◆ decided Outside gets Zigbee switches, not smart bulbs (~$145) — enclosed fixtures don't survive a bulb swap.
  • ◆ decided Entry & Everyday launches: contact sensors front and back, a silent doorbell gated by the nursery's nap-hush, and caregiver scene buttons (~$100 combined).
  • ◆ decided Laundry gets the radon fan's wattage-drop trick ($15) — same pattern, different appliance.
  • ◇ someday Frigate, two PoE cams, and a Coral TPU (~$250) plus a mailbox sensor ($15) wait on kara's compute budget.

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 — and once the laundry plug lands, a line if last night's load is still sitting in the dryer. 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.

Entry & Everyday

the door, the bell, and the wash · everyday hardware for two caregivers

The nursery gets sensors; the front door gets affordances. This section is the smallest dollar figure on the page and does the most for whoever's home alone with Walter: a door that logs itself, a doorbell that knows better than to ring, and buttons that don't require unlocking a phone.

The front door (~$30)

◆ decided Contact sensors, front and back ($15 each): door-left-open nagging and ingress logging on both entries — dumb, reliable, and indifferent to what anything else on the door thinks. The front door already has a Eufy smart lock (owner-installed) — glance-don't-build territory, same policy as the recteq's app: cloud-tied, unofficial HA integration only. Lock state isn't door-open state, either — the deadbolt can be thrown with the door standing open an inch — so the contact keeps its own line on this bill no matter what the lock reports. ◇ someday A local-first Zigbee lock is someday-tier, and only if lock automation ever actually earns its keep.

◆ decided Silent doorbell (~$35): a dumb button into a Zigbee relay — no chime hardware exists to ring. The chime itself is an HA event, gated by the nursery FP2's nap-hush: the doorbell physically cannot ring during a nap, because the press never reaches a speaker unless the house says it's awake. Answer path instead: a phone/dashboard push plus a light pulse in the nearest room. Reuses the hush logic the nursery already paid for.

◆ decided Caregiver scene buttons (~$35): Aqara or SONOFF Zigbee buttons — goodnight, hush override, shelter-mode — the affordance for a second caregiver to run the house without opening an app.

  • ◆ decided Laundry end-of-cycle ($15): a ThirdReality metering plug on the washer or dryer — the same wattage-drop-means-done pattern already proven on the radon fan.
  • ◇ someday Frigate, two PoE cameras, and a Coral TPU (~$250): local object detection, no cloud subscription — gated on kara's compute budget, not on the cameras themselves.
  • ◇ someday Mailbox sensor ($15): a contact sensor announces mail without a walk down the driveway.

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.