I had been thinking about upgrading the thermostats for a while, and I honestly thought it would be simple. I was very wrong: I ended up having to replace the zone controller and a power transformer as well, and it took me over a year to finish the job.
I implemented a way to automatically create Bluetooth Classic sockets between two nearby Android devices running the same app. This method works continuously in the background without wakelocks, and it does not require pairing, root, or any user interaction.
I was looking for a white elephant gift, and the silliness of this animatronic Christmas tree was too hard to pass up. The humor wore off after the third time I heard it sing, so I decided to make it useful by adding Alexa.
I found and ordered ELP’s stereo camera to calculate depth maps with OpenCV and see what I could do with them. It turns out that just getting a decent depth map was much more involved than I expected. Read and download my code here.