OCtranspo in Home Assistant
My wife asked for a sensor that would inform her of the next bus here in Ottawa. Turns out they have an actual API! Someone had tried this on the forums before but said the API had changed1. ...
My wife asked for a sensor that would inform her of the next bus here in Ottawa. Turns out they have an actual API! Someone had tried this on the forums before but said the API had changed1. ...
Iām pretty happy with my SensorPush outdoor temperature/humidity/pressure sensor. Itās not cheap but it is calibrated to work in a Canadian winter (most of it, at least). Their BLE adverts are automatically detected by HomeAssistant and decoded. Sometimes it appears to have a bit of a nap, adverts stop arriving (and Iāve checked with other BLE receivers) until the Android app wakes it up, probably the direct Bluetooth connection is all it wants. Also, the battery voltage doesnāt appear to be broadcast. SensorPush do actually publish an API but they only show the GATT characteristics that require active scanning. Also my readings donāt agree with their statement that I can read battery temperature. The Android app happily returns 20.9C (which seems high!), raw values seem to float around 0xffff. So, rather than try to get an ESP32 to lock up its active connection, draining the battery to see how quickly the battery is draining, Iām going for something more intermittent. ...
A nerd friend bought me a LILYGO E-paper display1, in the exact hope that Iād end up going down the rabbit hole of Smart Things. I have gone down this bloody rabbit hole. Iāve always been a sucker for data, and I aspire to heating my home more efficiently by measuring temperatures round the house and seeing how they change as I change demand. This is not a place of honour. Itās a place of a lot of YAML and black magic. Itās pretty cool when it works though: The board is a micro with Wi-Fi and a big-enough E-Paper Display (EPD) I can reconfigure it via context-aware text editor in the browser Push updates (also from the browser) Do some reasonably complex data processing and image/text rastering on the micro itself Control it from either a self-hosted server on the micro or from Home Assistant ...
Do I like Foundry as a Virtual Table Top? Yes, love it. Do I recommend it to others? Uh, well, it depends on your definition of ārecommendā š¬ Some idle screaming-into-the-void on Mastodon prompted a conversation with the Old Scouser Roleplayer about my Foundry setup, and I realised I end up typically saying the same thing a lot about Foundry: It is a beautiful product, especically for crunchier games You will absolutely get distracted with doors, and sight lines and music, and audio effects, and away from the actual game It is an utter pain to use securely. The word āsecurelyā here is key. There have been some cracking vulnerabilities in the software already (fixed already!). The developers are moving fast and breaking things, and thatās great for making a beautiful VTT with some really novel features, but less good for boring, stuffy, security. So I love Foundry, but I donāt trust it. Let me explain. ...
I have a spare laptop. Iām not going to spend ages cutting it up to make an actual photo-frame, and neither will I build one from scratch with a Raspberry Pi Zero. Iām just going to put it by the TV and see whether my wife and I look at it. Requirements: Show pictures after power on Get pictures from the NAS Auto-update them ...
How many pictures? I like taking pictures. How many pictures? Well, you know, some. $ find ~/pix/cam -type f | wc -l 10167 $ du -sh ~/pix/cam 47G ~/pix/cam That does not include pictures taken on my various mobile phones. And how many have I printed? Well, I think I have less than twenty framed. And I made two photobooks, and Iām not sure when I looked in them last. š¬ I try to finesse them down, weed out the crap (thereās a lot of bad pictures), crop, enhance, etc. And thatās hard and is a never-ending job and Iām just looking at them on my computer then, and my wife doesnāt see them at all. So, letās show āem off. This is a solved problem right? Right? ...
Never written up the few technical projects Iāve done on here, so hereās an old project, a clock to show the next sea tides. I got it on hackaday, which Iām very pleased with. A tide clock, complete Thereās a set of journal posts on the project page for it and source code. ...