31–32 of 32 posts
I was playing around with upgrading my own fan last year and ended up adding person-tracking capabilities so that the fan automatically stays pointed at me when I move. I ended up started a company, Following Fan, that builds and sells these tracking fans!
This is a nice hack, but I'm always very wary of playing with large voltages because it's too easy for things to go wrong. Instead, for controlling mains devices, I recommend a Sonoff S20: https://esphome.io/devices/sonoff_s20.html I usually flash ESPurna onto it (Tasmota and ESPhome are also good choices), it's very easy to do and it's extremely reliable and hopefully has a lower chance of fire than anything I'd mak…
The issue here is that these fancy tower fans don't have a mechanical on/off switch. So just switching the mains voltage does exactly crap. ...well not crap, mine beeps a few times when the power turns on =) The ESP32 fiddling is required to fake button presses on the touch sensitive buttons to make it actually start.
Well, I already opened it to solder a beeper bypass switch [aka "mute button], 'cause the thing was (multi-)beeping constantly, on every action and every result! But that mod is reversible without any visible changes... which reminds me, have to do the same to the bread machine. To my detriment, appliance makers these day are extremely beeper-happy.