Being able to use NFC (Near Field Communication) tags in home automation systems like Home Assistant has been around for a while, but until recently I didn’t see the benefit of sticking NFC stickers or using NFC cards. Until it occurred to me that it could help me make my home smarter without having a lot of technology in sight. After all, those NFC stickers fit right behind the buttons on my switches.

I had an eInk screen for a while with the intention of turning it into a birthday calendar. Now there are projects that can take a list of birthdays from Google Calendar and display them on an eInk screen, but I decided to do something different. The advantage of an eInk screen is that it only consumes power when the image changes. Because a birthday calendar only needs to be adjusted once a day, the screen does not need to be powered all day.

I have been thinking about 3D printing for a long time. A few years ago I supported a project on Kickstarter, but unfortunately that project has ended. On Tweakers.net I saw that the Creality Ender 3 v2 is often recommended to people who want to start with 3D printing, mainly because there is a large community behind it. And this 2nd version has a number of optimizations compared to the Ender 3.