I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little error. Fixing that error led me to realize that my new code for robustness had introduced an unfortunate artifact in that it would pass a status of “unchanged” to MQTT. So I fixed that. Code’s now in a good place. I just need to add a few more config options to make it more usable for others who aren’t me. Then I’ll make another release.

As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.