A test that sends mail needs somewhere for the message to land. fakeemaildomain.com is that place: a public mail exchanger that accepts the envelope, replies on purpose, and discards the body. The site has no signup, no inbox, and no forwarding.

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My JBL EON 515XT would not power on. The relay did not click, and the speaker barely drew any power from the wall. After a relay swap, voltage checks and a round of component testing, I tracked the fault to the LNK302DN power supply IC at U608. Replacing that chip brought the speaker back to life.

The useful part of this repair was how we isolated it. A low resistance reading around a capacitor initially gave us several possible suspects. Removing components and checking the same points again showed exactly where that low resistance was coming from.

If you have a JBL EON 515XT that will not turn on, these are the symptoms, measurements and checks from my repair. They describe this particular board and fault, so check your own component markings and board revision before ordering parts.

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For years the AC Infinity AirTap has been a popular register booster with a frustrating smart-home story: closed apps, Bluetooth-only workflows, and a control board that was never meant for local automations. We already solved that for earlier generations with drop-in ESPHome boards see the Gen2 install guide and shop module if you have that hardware. Then a newer AirTap showed up with something that almost made me celebrate out loud: an ESP32-C6-WROOM-1. [Read More]

I was experiencing a frustrating issue on Ubuntu 24.04 related to Bluetooth profile switching.

Update: Read the whole post before copying commands. My first fix moved WirePlumber from Ubuntu’s 0.4.17 package to 0.5.2 using the PipeWire Debian PPAs, and that helped for a while. The issue later returned. The current fix in this post is building WirePlumber 0.5.15 locally and holding those packages. If you stop at the PPA step, you may only end up on 0.5.2 and waste time if your Bluetooth issue is the same one I hit.

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Owners of the AC Infinity AirTap T4/T6 with a Gen2 vent can replace the factory control board with our ESP32 module to add local smart home control through ESPHome and Home Assistant. The Gen2 housing keeps the original button bracket in place. The kit includes a small display cover bracket made for the Gen2 layout. This guide walks through what is in the kit, how that cover bracket fits, and the exact steps to install the PCB. [Read More]

The SiloCityLabs ESP32 Module for the AC Infinity AirTap T4/T6 already gives Home Assistant users a clean way to upgrade an AirTap vent into a connected smart-home device. The current ESPHome firmware path supports the important hardware pieces: PWM fan control, onboard temperature sensing, OLED display output, physical buttons, panel lockout, and newer IR receiver support on supported builds.

But there is another smart-home audience that could benefit from this hardware: Apple Home users.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, using HomePod, Siri on iPhone, Apple TV, scenes, automations, and the Apple Home app, the natural question is: Could the AirTap ESP32 upgrade kit run native Apple Home firmware instead of ESPHome?

Yes it can! HomeSpan provides developers with libraries to create an ESP32 firmware that pairs the AirTap directly with Apple Home over Wi-Fi. That’s native Apple support without Home Assistant, without a Home Assistant HomeKit Bridge, and without a separate server translating ESPHome entities into HomeKit accessories.

This post is not a finished firmware release. It is a technical roadmap for developers, makers, and advanced AirTap owners who want to understand what it would take to build one. It’s enough architecture to start the project, enough code structure to see the direction, and enough caution to avoid the obvious traps.

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Remember when you could open your computer or browser and not immediately get “suggested content”? Most apps nowadays open to a “home” or “feed” page. I miss bookmarks, so I’m bringing them back. I’m bypassing the slop conveyor that is YouTube’s home page. I’m jumping straight to the subscriptions - the content I actually asked to see.

This was easy to automate in Tasker using Android intents.

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What started as a simple local development tool for DigitalOcean Functions quietly turned into something much more serious: a production-grade failover system that now runs across home TrueNAS servers owned by the operators of FilaMeter. Internally, we call it DOrunner. The original goal was mundane—test Go-based serverless functions locally without burning through API calls or waiting on cloud deploys. But as usage grew and traffic patterns became less predictable, that local runner evolved into a core part of our production architecture. [Read More]

Somehow, OpenSCAD has become my main 3D modeling program. It’s incredibly powerful for parametric models but it’s also brain-intensive. I speed up development with the BOSL2 library. Many BOSL2 objects have built-in rounding features so I don’t need to invoke minkowski().

A trick with BOSL2 is negative rounding. Instead of cutting a corner, it makes the corner stick out. This is very useful for smoothing sharp edges, tapering pin holes, and generally filleting odd shapes. Make an object with negative rounding/chamfer, then use it to cut another object with subtract().

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Owners of the AC Infinity AirTap T4/T6 may be looking for a way to retrofit their older Gen2 ESP32 module so it can operate inside the newer Gen3 AirTap vent. The Gen3 design uses a different mounting layout and sensor position, which means the original Gen2 hardware does not fit or function without modification. To solve this, we created a simple upgrade path that lets you reuse your Gen2 module with full Gen3 compatibility. [Read More]