A few months ago I started using Home Assistant for my room. Adding lights, fans, sensors, and other things via esp8266 modules. I can turn things on and off with location tracking of my phone. I have temp sensors in the kitchen and living room to track that and figure the difference from my room and the rest of the house. It’s running on a proxmox server in a VM using this helper script.

I have a set of external disks I use for backup purposes for my Plex box. In their next to second final state, where I setup something to turn them on and off with a script, I have them wired to a xbox 360 power supply and a 10 port powered usb hub. The hard drives connect to the hub, the hub to the server. As you do. The fun part, the hub isolates power to the devices from the host pc so I can simply turn off power to the hub and the usb things disconnect.

My projects involving ESP8266 Microcontrollers. To Be Updated as needed.

Picked up a Raspberry Pi 5. Ordered it the day it went on sale and after some shipping delays with Fedex, it arrived. A pi, red and white case, and the power supply. So far, I’m impressed. Got it running Raspbien on a 1TB Samsung SSD attached to a sata to usb enclosure with both 1080p monitors and kb and mouse. Basic setup, really. + the 2nd monitor, where I’d assume most would just use one.

Adding an aftermarket amp and sub to my 2015 Ford F-150, trials and tribulations.

My New adventures into Ham Radios using SDR and my computer

A week ago I purchased a SDR dongle for some radio experiments. With the idea to maybe receive weather data or maybe plot airplanes. I got this little guy. A SDR made by adafruit. It was sold out on their website but linked to digikey who happened to have it. So far, I’ve been able to pick up regular local FM radio stations and the local NWS using CubicSDR on Linux.

So I don’t really use my big Dell Poweredge R710 much anymore aside from just using it for heating the room in the winter. It’s just too slow, data transfer wise, for me to enjoy it anymore. maybe it’s my config but idk. I don’t want to put any more money in it if it’s not gonna help with that. Maybe if I can get a few TB worth of SSDs for a low price and replace the two Sun F40 SSDs in the rear as they run too hot for what speeds I get out of them.

Where to start… First, the hugo site is stored in a git repository. I’m using Cloudflare’s Pages feature to host the generated code. My domain and DNS is managed there as well. You need a domain name of some sort. Buy one from places like godaddy or namecheap. I’m not going to cover that part. You can also register one with cloudflare. Then you’ll need to create an account at cloudflare where you’ll add your domain, obtain the nameservers to point your domain to, and once that’s done, you can start adding your dns records.

This marks the move to Hugo, replacing the old Octopress powered one that I just couldn’t bring it up to date. That, and I grew tired of the old theme. Time for a change.