Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security Deposit)
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote control… nothin’ fancy whatsoever.
- ▪TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank.
- ▪My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit.
- ▪No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote control… nothin’ fancy whatsoever.
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Record
| Original publisher | prilik's blog |
| Canonical URL | https://prilik.com/blog/post/automating-ac-nyc/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:28:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T19:21:02.902Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T19:21:02.902Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Kl4PbpOVLsl4 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote control… nothin’ fancy whatsoever. These knobs work… but having to constantly stand up and fiddle with them gets annoying pretty quick. Fortunately, there’s an ‘ol Prilik family saying that goes something like this: “remember son - the hardest problems in life can usually be solved with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a dream”1 And sure enough, after dropping ~$15 on parts, waiting for things to arrive from China, and spending a few hours iterating on the hardware assembly and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at prilik's blog.
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