I’m trying to learn ways to minimize my reliance upon large companies for handling my day-to-day personal data. So I figured calendar and contacts should be on my list of things to self-host. This post is about how I migrated all my Google calendars and phone contacts to my own server without losing any features I was using. I’m doing this mostly for fun.
Continue reading Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
I got a few Amcrest Wifi security cameras for my mom’s house at her request. They’re pretty nice overall (My only complaint is that the web-interface doesn’t fully support Linux). I set one up to save a jpg snapshot to memory every minute and then flew across the country. When I wanted to access them, I couldn’t just put the SD-card in a computer or anything, and clicking all 14,000 of them seemed like a pain, so I decided to figure out how to get them with a Python script.
Continue reading Downloading files from an Amcrest security camera with Python
There are some digital levels on the market that are really nice tools to have for a variety of purposes. I grabbed a DXL360 and am really happy with it so far. When I wanted to do an angle vs. time calibration measurement of my Barn Door Startracker over 10s of minutes, I really wanted to get the data from the level into a computer so I could plot and process it a bit.
The level has a USB port but the manual suggests that an optional attachment is required to get it into a computer, at least for this model. However, the manual also states that data comes out of it in RS232 format. I bet I could read that data with some more generic equipment that I have sitting around. And it turned out to be easy. This post shows how I did it.
Continue reading Reading data from a DXL360 digital level onto your computer
I like to mix hobbies, so naturally I’ve been eying astrophotography for a while. I’ve taken a time-lapse here and a moon picture there but, inspired by the folks over at /r/astrophotography, I wanted to take it to the next level. Since the Earth is spinning, any long exposure of the night sky has star trails, so you have to make your camera counter-spin if you want clear shots. In this post, you can read about how I made a simple barn door sky tracker to do this.
Barn door sky trackers have been made at home by lots of people for a long time. There are a variety of designs with different levels of complexity and precision required. I thought I’d make the simplest-to-construct one, a Haig mount. To correct he tangent error, I decided to use a cheap microcontroller (MCU) and have it speed up appropriately via software. Fun!
The math behind this is fun mostly because it’s straight out of high school and you finally at long last get to use it. Here’s the basic design:
I use SpamAssassin on my e-mail server to flag spam messages that come to my addresses. It uses a series of checks on each message and determines a Spam Score. If the Score is above a user-defined threshold, it adds a header that says that it is spam. Then dovecot files it away into a spam folder instead of my inbox. It does a pretty good job but requires tuning sometimes. I wanted to see if I could change my threshold from the default (5.0) without getting too many false positives or negatives. To do that, I’d have to collect some stats from my messages.
A year ago, my friend Laura was wishing that email providers could do some tone filtering and reject messages that are too mean. Since I run my own email server, I thought it might be simple to set something like that up easily. Turns out, it’s not that hard, but it wasn’t exactly trivial to figure out.
I run have postfix running to receive messages from the internet. It passes them through SpamAssassin, which inspects the messages and adds a few headers that indicate whether or not it’s spam. Then it passes them on to dovecot , which stores the messages in mailboxes and then tells with my email client, Thunderbird, that I’ve got mail. I like this setup because I feel like I have a bit more control over my data. Besides, it’s fun!
The original request is here shown below. I figure, if I could just have the message go through a second filter after it goes through spamassassin, I could make it a custom script that counts swear words.
I got one of those RGB LED matrix things for my birthday and wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then I found this awesome library which has Python bindings and can control it nicely even from a Raspberry Pi. Conveniently I had a spare Raspberry Pi 1 B+ sitting around so I hooked it up. After playing around for a while, I got the demos working.
UPDATE: Full documentation of infopanel is now available.
But I needed to connect it to home-assistant to really make it valuable to myself. So I wrote a little program called Infopanel (available for free on github) that lets you do some things:
You can set the scenes to be just random or you can control them through MQTT.
It’s intended to be very configurable but since it’s brand new some extra development is needed to make everything perfect. Send in your ideas and requests and code changes!
A relatively complete example configuration file is in the repo. That demonstrates using MQTT, connecting MQTT topics to various sprites, building your own frames of animation by hand, and adding in gifs and images from file paths. Note that you have to set an environmental variable or two to get the fonts right and whatnot.
Note: This is a thowback post, revitalized from the old partofthething.com where it was posted by me in like, 2004. I took out most last names.
My car:My car is the ultimate car ever. It’s the greatest thing on Earth. No, really. It is. Sure, sure it’s old but that’s not what matters anymore. It’s the past that counts…and the stereo system. I grew up in this car. Yes sir I did. I always sat in the back right seat driving all over the place since I was seven years old. Usually Tom Petty was playing. you see, it used to be my mom’s car. When she got a new one, it became my sister’s car. And then, it became my car.
I have a website or two and sometime wish I could get notifications whenever someone visited them, just for fun. Well I did it, and now I can get beeps in my home whenever anyone visits. It’s kind of cool to hear it go off, though normally it will be annoying, so we need a switch for it.
Collecting information about our surroundings, analyzing it to make conclusions, and then performing actions based on those conclusions is the definition of life itself. Organisms generally care most about their food source, dangerous strangers nearby, environmental changes, and family planning. For example, the rabbit pays attention to nearby gardens, the closest rival warren, any nearby foxes, human constructions, and potential lover rabbits*. The human was concerned with roughly the same things for years immeasurable, but since the Bronze Age, as we spread out globally and invented neat technologies, things became a bit more complex.
Continue reading Adding rigor to information analysis in the era of Fake News and Alternative Facts
I learned on reddit the other day about the sudo “insults” capability where it throws shade at you when you mistype the password. I configured it everywhere I could, but I wanted more, so I came across cowsay and fortune.
$ fortune | cowsay / SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! \ \ POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||
Needless to say… wow.
My mom has one of those on/off furnaces (EDIT: actually it’s a boiler) that heats up water and circulates it through pipes around the house that have little radiator fins. She wants it to turn on before she wakes up so it’s not so cold in the morning. In this post, I explain how to turn a normal furnace into a smart furnace controlled by Home Assistant for only a few bucks.
Oh this is exciting! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get motion events from my IP camera into my home-assistant instance running on my Raspberry Pi, and I just did a successful test! It works! Hooray. Briefly, I set up an email server on the Pi, have the camera email the Pi, have the email server trigger a script which parses the email for key words and sends MQTT signals as appropriate, at which point the home-assistant MQTT client sees them and triggers automations (like blinking a light to scare people off). Here’s how I did it.
Continue reading Getting IP camera motion events into Home Assistant to trigger things
As documented earlier, I made one of those CRT-in-a-winebottle things. I used a cheap 2-stage mechanical vacuum pump for it. Well, it was so good that my boss wanted to use it as a science demo at some dinners he gives, so it’s been permanently transferred to work. So I need a new pump, and a new chamber!
Continue reading Cheap vacuum pump for home physics experiments
I got my first motorcycle, a 1997 Suzuki GS500, in 2007. It was great for a long time. I cut my motorcycle maintenance teeth on it, starting with gas line issues, shim adjustments, and an oil leak fix. Things escalated to taking the pistons out and head off to get the top-end rebuilt. Issues kept popping up more frequently than I liked so I sold it in 2012 and got a brand new Suzuki DL650A V-Strom ABS (aka “Glee”), feeling like I had had enough maintenance for a while. I only felt a little shame when I took it in to the shop for some routine maintenance
Well…I guess I’m back in the routine. After I totaled it but kept it, I got warmed up doing basic maintenance stuff on it. So when an issue came up recently, I decided to fix it myself.
UPDATE Jan 2017: Whaddaya know? The stator was just recalled due to a tendancy for this to happen.
I just configured a pretty slick burglar alarm with the open-source Home-Assistant platform running on my Raspberry Pi. It can be armed to trigger when a door is opened and/or when a motion sensor goes off.
Then, a sequence of events happens:
Continue reading Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant DIY Burglar Alarm
Or, how to control your A/C from your phone
You may have seen my earlier post about my new home automation setup. Well I just upgraded it! I just finished testing out a new infrared remote control send and receive capability and it is pure awesome. Here’s what I can do now from within home-assistant:
This post is about how I did it on my Raspberry Pi.
Update: A video!
Continue reading Adding IR send and receive capabilities to my home-assistant based smart home
I went out for a quick motorcycle ride one night just as it started to rain. I turned South from Pine onto Broadway towards the gas station and the next thing I knew I was sliding along the ground in the middle of the road. I wasn’t being careful enough and had slipped on the new streetcar rails.
A guy helped me lift the bike and get it out of traffic. I was dazed but the only damage I could see was a broken side-stand. The bike started fine and I rode it a few blocks home, defeated. I leaned it up against the wall and checked for more damage. There was a little scuff on the engine and the side case was scratched. And there was a small ding in the front wheel from hitting the center divider. Not bad. Looks like the crashbars did their job!
Continue reading My experience totaling my motorcycle after slipping on streetcar rails
I’ve been learning about my Canon EOS D-SLR camera and wanted to try a time-lapse cloud video. It was pretty easy!
Continue reading Time-lapse cloud video
I went over to my friend’s house last night to help get home-assistant on a Raspberry Pi working for his z-wave door sensors and siren. The Ecotech sensor showed up fine but the Aeotech recessed one (Recessed Door Sensor Gen5 , ZW089-A) did not show up by default. After poking around in the logs for a while, we realized that it was sending BASIC_SET command classes instead of BinarySensor commands. Apparently (I thought I had fixed this already), home-assistant doesn’t recognize the BASIC_SET commands just yet. But looking at the config file for this device, we discovered that config item 121 changes which kind of report this sensor sends:
Continue reading Using an Aeotech recessed door sensor in home-assistant
