2025 Tech To-Do

At the end of 2024, I decided to do a little look back at some of the technical stuff I’d played with over the previous year (how well done that was I’ll leave to you to gauge). Now it’s time to take a look forward at what I’m thinking about looking at over the coming year in 2025…

Note this post has been updated since it was originally published - 3rd January 2025

Eco Home

We’ve plans to get a solar/battery/heatpump combination installed in the house during 2025. Partially as a way to cut down on our gas and electricity usage, but also to try and become a little more “Eco” and self generate some of the energy we use. I’ve done some very basic research, but once we’re certain that we’re going to do it I’ll ramp up the knowledge gathering. Current thoughts:

• Solar - We have an East-West facing house with a mixed cross box-gable / dormer roof (different on each side), so probably looking at a set of panels on each side along the ridge so that we pick up solar throughout the day. Would like to get a reasonably sized system to make the most of what little sun we do get in the UK, I’m guessing “ideal” sizing would allow us to be able to generate enough to power as much of the house as possible, and charge any battery for use overnight? Not sure how realistic that is though.
• Battery - No idea on battery sizing, though ideally I’d like to make as much of the battery as possible, particularly overnight. I guess “ideal” sizing is around what we’re likely to use during solar non-generating hours, plus a bit more?
• Heatpump - Probably where I’ve done the most research, and split here between an air-water system or an air-air. While we’ve got a (fairly) new-build house it’s all microbore for the radiators, so there’s a risk on an air-water that we’d need all the pipework replacing. At that point, an air-air may be equally/less disruptive, and gives the advantage of giving cooling during the summer as well (when it actually gets hot in the UK!). If we don’t need to replace pipework, then an air-water will likely be cheaper and less disruptive, though may need to consider separate AC as well…

More Home Assistant

I’m definitely going to be doing more with Home Assistant over the next year:

• Energy - As above we’ve plans to get solar/battery/heatpump installed during 2025. That then includes integration into Home Assistant both for logging and monitoring, but also local control. Next stage (possibly 2026) will then be to add some “intelligent” control based on unit pricing, presence detection, etc.
• Dashboard - I hope to be able to set up a couple of wall mount dashboards in the house (likely tablet based) to be able to see and control stuff without having to drag a phone out of a pocket.
• Voice - The new Home Assistant Voice PE seems like a cool piece of kit and I could possibly find space for a couple around the house (or build my own?).
• HA hardware upgrade - My Home Assistant Green has done sterling work over the last 12 months (I bought my Green on 18th Jan 2024), but I’d like to be able to do voice TTS & STT locally, and both running ESPHome builds via the add-in can be slow, and storage usage is slowly but surely creeping up (the Green only has 32GB onboard). So 2025 is likely the year to move up to something a little more powerful (likely some form of MiniPC running HAOS).

More ESPHome

As with Home Assistant, it’s likely I’ll do more with ESPHome devices (in some manner):

• Displays - I’ll continue to refine my eInk/ePaper displays to be more useful. Hoping that at some point in 2025 they add support for 1bpp for LVGL on ESPHome (rather than just 16bpp). That’ll give me opportunity to play with LVGL on ePaper rather than just the existing Lambda based layouts!
• Displays 2 - Possibly take more of a look at LCD/OLED based displays for ESPHome. I did briefly try a cheap SPI LCD screen but wasn’t very impressed with it. I’ve since played a little with a 1.28" Waveshare Touch which has worked well (especially with LVGL), and they now do a 7" version, so it might be cool to try that.
• “Community” hardware - I’ve started having a play with some “community” hardware for ESPHome, i.e. hardware created by people rather than companies. Last week I picked up a mini audio board by @RevK which I’ve been slowly getting ESPHome’d up (possibly for a voice assistant?), and I’ve just ordered one of his ePaper driver boards as a possible alternative to using the “official” Waveshare driver board (it’s a slimmer all-in-one board, so will likely wall-mount easier). Plan is to see what other alternative hardware is out there, particularly if there’s anyone doing a single board ESP32 & stereo audio board to build a media player around…

More 3D Printing

I got my first 3D printer back in June 2024, and I’ve been enjoying getting into printing my own stuff. So far it’s been a mix of decorative/play models downloaded from online, and some more functional pieces I’ve designed myself. Over Christmas I did try doing some more decorative pieces I designed myself, and they came out surprisingly well (considering I have similar artistic skills as our cat). So possibly scope to start designing more creative pieces this year?

More Web

I did post on Mastodon as part of my 2024 review that one aim for 2025 is to try and write some more stuff for this website. I’m not expecting to become a blogging machine and turn out post after post, but if I can get 1-2 posts a month I’ll be happy! Some possible topics:

• A short series on doing a basic ESPHome based device, possibly a presence sensor?
• More detail on my Home Assistant setup?
• More detail on what I’m doing with ESPHome?
• If we do get solar/battery/heatpump in, do some kind of writeup?

Local LLM

I know this is going to be a contentious item.

There’s a lot of justified backlash about LLMs at the moment, and I’m not going to defend OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else who’s in the market for putting “Artifical Intelligence” wherever and whenever they can without any consideration for who it impacts (particularly GenerativeAI).

I also fully believe that there needs to be regulation and oversight on the use of “AI”, and consideration for how you compensate sources of training data in a fair way.

But I don’t think that the answer is to outright say “No AI, ever at all!”. I think there are potential use cases, particularly when you get into locally run, private LLMs.

Feel free to agree or disagree with me, but I’m not about to get into an argument or flame war over this :-)

With the above note out of the way, I am interested in the use of smaller LLMs running locally for personal use. For example, combining Ollama with Home Assistant as a [conversation agent]](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ollama/) can allow more natural voice control, with better parsing of context and intent without having to go out to the cloud.

The issue however still seems to be available compute power and power requirements to get decent performance, though boards like the Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano seem to offer reasonable compute power in a small and (relatively) power efficient form-factor and may be something I’ll investigate at some point.

Unlikely Items

• I still don’t see a need to run my own Fediverse / Mastodon instance. I know a lot of people do, but I’m more than happy running on a shared instance (as long as the Online Safety Act doesn’t kill it off).
• I’m unlikely to do much with my VPS running Web & Mail for this domain. It’s been sat on Beasts for a while now and I’m unlikely to change it.

And I think that’s about it. I still need to leave time to actually spend time with the family, and have time away from technology to do more relaxing stuff (with Christmas I have a backlog of books to get through). Plus there’s obviously the day job which I need to give some time to!

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Posted 2 January 2025

In Technology 3DPrinter HomeAutomation SmartHome HomeAssistant ESPHome Solar Battery Heatpump Updated