Posts

I am a huge fan of home automation. My last house was filled with so many hue lights, that we surpassed the limit of bulbs that could be joined to a single hue bridge (having to combine these bridges was my first dive into Home Assistant, I’ll have more on this setup in a later post). But I’m also a fan of technology that respects my freedoms and privacy - and unfortunately, pretty much all consumer home automation ecosystems rely on closed cloud services that package and sell your data to the highest bidder. Worse, appliances that pack in WiFi connectivity, like Samsung’s line of smart refrigerators, tend to lose support quickly, leaving consumers out of luck on features or exposed to security risks. Some features that would solve a few problems just weren’t in any of the offerings, either, so naturally I decided to roll my own. ...

I’ve been working lately on making some TVs mounted around my local maker space more useful, displaying event information pulled from meetup. I opted to generate the displays with HTML, and wanted a no-frills thin client that would boot straight to a full screen web browser to display the info. This kind of setup would also be useful for a dedicated web-app on a kiosk with a touch screen. Here’s how I did that on a Pi B+ and 3, but the following instructions should work with any Raspberry Pi: ...

440 MHz micro foxA 440MHz fixed-frequency foxhunt transmitter I intended to use as a stationary fox. A Digistump drives a small 433 MHz transmitter module wrapped in yellow heatshrink. While any significant amount of metal is enough to capacitive load the transmitter out of oscillation, it does function decently indoors in convention spaces. I’ve been wanting to put together my own foxhunt transmitter to use at conventions, and since I’d never etched a PCB before I decided to go for broke and make this controller board my first circuit board experience. ...