Introduction: A while back I wrote up how I put three Nedis WIFIDS10WT smoke detectors onto Tasmota, ran them off a permanent supply instead of batteries, and pulled fire/test/mute/battery into Home Assistant over MQTT (the blakadder template does the heavy lifting). That got the hardware smart and talking – but living with it for a […]
Home Assistant – Smart smoke alarms, part 2: making the data honest Read More »
Introduction: Some projects nag at you for years. This is one of them. About three years ago I transplanted an ESP32 into the cheap-and-cheerful dehumidifier that keeps our conservatory habitable, wired a relay across its ON/OFF button, and called it “smart”. The trouble was it could press the button but it never really knew whether
1. Introduction: A little while ago my smoke detector started to randomly wake me up with unexplainable alerts so I decided that it’s time for a new one. The hunt for a model that would be available in the UK for under £50, without the need for a third party cloud and the ability to
Home Assistant – Cloud free Wifi Smoke Detectors on a budget Read More »
Introduction: For those unaware of the event, CeBIT is held annually on the Hanover fairground. For an idea of scale, the exhibition area roughly covers 450.000m2 and the five day event attracted over 300.000 visitors this year. For those of you who know the IP EXPO in London, imagine 15+ halls like it and multiply
CeBIT 2013 – Trends and Impressions Read More »
Introduction: I was lately blessed with an array of coursework assignments for a module called “Paradigms of Programming”. The language I picked to get into imperative programming was Pascal and I had a few fun weekend with it programming a currency converter. I’m hoping others might find the resulting code helpful or interesting 🙂 Preparations:
First Steps with Free Pascal – The currency converter Read More »
Introduction: I was lately blessed with an array of coursework assignments for a module called “Paradigms of Programming”. The language I picked to get into functional programming was Haskell and I had a few fun afternoons with it programming a word counter which counts both the total number of words as well as the frequency
First steps with Haskell – The word counter Read More »
1. Introduction: Since I’ve just upgraded the NAS I’ve ended up with a spare Mini-ITX Atom board. Perfect timing to replace the old Smoothwall gateway and finally eradicate the last 32bit machine I’ve got running 🙂 I’ve been using Smoothwall since 2007 now, my first box was based on a P3 1Ghz but quickly replaced
How to build a Smoothwall Gateway the hard way (Dual Core/Dual Gigabit/Mini-ITX) Read More »
Here was me thinking that it would be a good idea to finally replace my old laptop based Smoothwall setup with a nice mini-itx one… The mini-itx board in question is a Intel D945GCLF2 and has been working hard over the past few years as my home NAS. Since I just swapped it for a Gigabyte GA-D525TUD to
Intel D945GCLF2 vs GPT and Smoothwall 3.0 SP3 Read More »
Introduction: OS X Mountain Lion just popped up in the App Store so I could not resist to download it at work where it takes 30 minutes compared to several hours back home. As with Lion the setup is handled through an installer which one get’s (after appropriate payment obviously) through the App Store. The
How to install OS X Mountain Lion from an external drive Read More »
1. Introduction: For my new Arduino controlled greenhouse project I lately required a new Arduino Mega Protoshield. I’ve had the nice red Sparkfun one for quite some time now but since I’m using an Arduino Mega 2560 for this project I wanted something that brought up the additional new pins and the ICSP header. The
The Arduino Mega Protoshield Kit – Build Instructions Read More »