In a lot of my apartment installs, I use Zigbee sensors to track things such as occupancy.
Unfortunately, in some apartments, many devices drop off the network frequently, and I can't see any pattern to this behaviour.
I picked up an Artika ceiling light on clearance at Costco.
Its formatted as a giant oyster light, and internally, has a smart power supply with an IR receiver, and (electrically) a pair of LED strips, one with warm white emitters and one with cool white emitters.
The power supply isn't that smart, there is no network connectivity, only IR. To make it smarter, I buzzed out the microcontroller to identify where the pins went, with the intent to replace it with an ESP32 running ESPHome.
I would like to use the Dahua Home Assistant Integration to pull the intercom in an apartment into the home automation. Unfortunately, the credentials in the intercom UI are starred out.
Inside the unit is a microsd card. Unfortunately, there is nothing on it, presumably it is for storing image snapshots. There does not seem to be a way in the UI to back up the settings to the SD card Either.
I recently had a need to be able to send and receive SMSes programatically, and decided the cheapest way to do it was with a USB LTE modem, and an ALDI PAYG SIM, which only costs $5, with a 1 year expiry, unlimited SMSes received, and $0.12 to send an SMS.
I managed to brick one of my Netgear M5300 switches while trying to factory reset it, by selecting "Erase permanent storage" from the boot menu. At this point, it displays 'Uboot M5300 VerNo=1.0.0.6' on the console and does not progress further.
To recover, get a FAT32 formatted USB drive, and save the firmware as 'boot.stk' on it.
Insert the drive into the switch, connect to the serial console and power up the switch.
Interrupt Uboot by pressing Q. You should get a '=>' prompt.
At Linux Conf 2019, I'll be running a home automation workshop, based on Home Assistant and my 1Wire home automation devices.
I recently had a MyRepublic NBN connection installed, and was provided with a Technicolor TG789vac V2 VDSL2 modem. It arrived quite locked down, in routed mode it could not deal with the complexity of my network (multiple VLANs), and in bridge mode it bridged the VDSL2 interface to the Wifi connection, but not Ethernet!
This is a 3d printed fan shroud that I designed and 3d printed myself. It is made from durable ABS plastic, and allows you to connect a 125mm flexible duct to your miner's exhaust, allowing you to vent the hot air directly outside (or in winter, into your air conditioning ducts).
The mount features a negative taper, such that pulling on the duct increases the clamping force.
You will need 4 50mm M4 machine screws, and a 125mm diameter screw clamp to fasten the ducting on.
One of my 3D printers has been acting up recently - the right extruder heater is stuck on, rendering the machine unusable.
Our airconditioner gives a "C5" Error when in heating mode, which is annoying as Canberra gets quite cold in winter.
Looking at the list of error codes, it shows that C5 is a thermistor failure on the indoor gas pipe. Opening the indoor unit and measuring the resistance of the thermistor shows it in the ~2.8MOhm range, well outside what it should be.