Early last summer, I made an always-on wall-mounted monitor so I could watch what Home Assistant was doing with our solar plant, security cameras, EV charging, hot tub heating, landscape lighting, and so forth. It was based on a $60 Android tablet, and I thought it was pretty cool.
I’ve added a lot of features since then, and done a lot of debugging. I thought I’d eliminated all the serious bugs. Until now.
Recently, I’ve noticed some ants crawling on the wall where the monitor is mounted. Eventually, I noticed that they were going in and out through a small hole in the wall, but then they would crawl behind the tablet and disappear. I put some Terro on one of the tablet mounts, as that has been 100% effective for the ants around here, but they showed no interest.
I was wondering where the ants were going, as they would disappear behind the tablet but never come out. I took the tablet down off the wall, and in a few minutes there were no longer any ants on the wall. I cleaned the wall and plugged a couple of tiny holes in the (112-year-old) woodwork. When I put the tablet back up, within an hour or so the ants had returned.
I attended to other issues around the compound, and this time the ants had formed a thick trail to down behind the tablet. Now when I took the tablet off the wall, I discovered that they were going in and out through the empty SD card slot!
I’ve turned the tablet off and placed it outside. I’m not sure what to do. I don’t have any insecticides around except boric acid. I’ve already taped off some other holes in the tablet, but there are quite a few. I suppose I could put a card in the slot, tape everything as best I can, and see what happens.
Pesky bugs!
—2p