Like many of us of a certain vintage, [Dillan Stock] at The Stock Pot is nostalgic for VHS tapes. It’s not so much the fuzzy picture or the tracking issues we miss, but the physical experience the physical medium brought to movie night. To recreate that magic, [Dillan] made a Modern VHS with NFC and ESPHome.

NFC tags are contained in handsomely designed 3D printed cartridges. You can tell [Dillan] put quite a bit of thought into the industrial design of these: there’s something delightfully Atari-like about them, but they have the correct aspect ratio to hold a miniaturized movie poster as a label. They’re designed to print in two pieces (no plastic wasted on supports) and snap together without glue. The printed reader is equally well thought out, with print-in-place springs for that all important analog clunk.

Electronically, the reader is almost as simple as the cartridge: it holds the NFC reader board and an ESP32. This is very similar to NFC-based audio players we’ve featured before, but it differs in the programming. Here, the ESP32 does nothing related directly to playing media: it is simply programmed to forward the NFC tag id to ESPHome. Based on that tag ID, ESPHome can turn on the TV, cue the appropriate media from a Plex server (or elsewhere), or do… well, literally anything. It’s ESPHome; if you wanted to make this and have a cartridge to start your coffee maker, you could.

If this tickles your nostalgia bone, [Dillan] has links to all the code, 3D files and even the label templates on his site. If you’re not sold yet, check out the video below and you might just change your mind. We’ve seen hacks from The Stock Pot before, everything from a rebuilt lamp to an elegant downspout and a universal remote.

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out with, after three years of using a more basic off-the-shelf unit that offered no remote access nor a convenient user interface. The use case for [Jeff] was rather straightforward: the door would be open during the day and closed at night to keep the hens safely inside the coop.

The commercial solution offered an RTC-backed programmable interface as well as a light sensor, but the latter wasn’t always reliable in inclement weather and making simple changes to the programming when e.g. the hens had to stay inside a day due to work on the yard, was much more complicated than needed, plus had to be done on the spot. The new system would solve all these ills.

That said, the existing door mechanism was doing a fine job and could be kept. This just left making a new box with electronics to control it, starting with an ESP32C3 with the ESPHome firmware that is hooked into the local Home Assistant system, along with a motor to lift and lower the door and with magnetic contact sensors.

So far so easy. The hard part came with the installation, which involved trenching to the hen house for mains power, repairing the damage from this, and troubleshooting a power issue that turned out to be due to a dodgy power adapter. The payoff is that now the chicken coop is also part of the smart home and their owner never has to trudge through a soggy garden again to adjust the programming on a dim LC display with far too few buttons.