Bits, pandas and sparks
High food drive dogs are always hungry, they’ll do anything to get a refill, even lie to your face.
Voldo is one of those, “did you feed the dog?” is a common question around the house and more often that we would like to admit he manages to double-dip.
Lately I’ve been in an automation spree around the house. Since COVID-19 we’ve been working from home and spending most of our time indoors, so it makes sense that all the projects we had gathering dust are becoming important again.
In future posts I’ll talk more about what I’m using to drive my IoT devices, but the core of it all is a Home Assistant instance running inside my FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) server, in a Virtual Machine with Home Assistant Operating System.
This gives me access to the official Add-on Store and runs everything seamlessly, without fear of breaking everything up on an upgrade.
I’ve got a few wall switches, some plugs, LED strips and bulbs… everything running the latest Tasmota. Tasmota is an Open Source firmware that can be installed on almost all Chinese IoT devices that are running inside an ESP8266 (think of it like an Arduino with integrated WiFi).
Tasmota works great, and in latest version it integrates directly with Home Assistant. Older versions needed an MQTT server to broker messages to and from the devices. If you’ve never used MQTT you’ll find it similar to an email inbox and outbox, where your device sends messages to Home Assistant (ie: I turned myself on) and Home Assistant leaves messages for your device (ie: Turn yourself on).
Home Assistant integrates with MQTT as a way to communicate with a lot of stuff, not only with Tasmota devices, but with basically anything that can send messages in a format HA understands.
(more…)I recently found out about the existence of rechargeable 1.5V AAA batteries. Most people don’t know that normal NiMH AA or AAA batteries don’t output 1.5V like a normal Duracell battery would.
NiMH AA/AAA batteries are rated to 1.2V but they’ll give you 1.4V when fully charged and start dropping their voltage when they start to deplete.
The chinese company Kentli sells 14500 format Li-ion batteries that include a buck converter that will drop the 3.7V a Li-ion battery gives to 1.5V. The form factor is the same as a normal AA/AAA battery and they’ll work in most appliances.
I recently moved from Cura to Simplify3D and one of the things I really missed was the ability to upload and start a printing job directly from the slicer UI.
This is not directly supported, but Simplify3D can execute a script to post process the generated gcode file. There you can tell Simplify3D to upload and print the genearted gcode file.
You need to have cURL installed in your system. This already comes out of the box on macOS and most Linux distributions. Check this guide out to install cURL on Windows.
Once installed, edit your printed profile by editing a Process, and on the Scripts tab, under “Post processing”, input the following:
curl -k -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" -F "select=true" -F "print=true" -F "file=@[output_filepath]" "http://OCTOPRINT_IP/api/files/local" {STRIP "; postProcessing"}A few weeks ago, while I was reorganizing my workspace I found a 10 meter reel of NeoPixels.
Originally I wanted to put them behind a Ikea Kallax shelf where I put random junk, but since I’m working from home a lot lately it seemed a better idea to put them behind my screen!
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