I've been using a Co2 sensor for a long time now to remind myself to regularly open the window and vent the used up air. With my recently newly acquired hobby of home automation, I wanted to get its data into HomeAssistant to _automatically_ switch on the ventilation. This blag post documents my journey with a couple of detours and a bit of hacking.
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I've recently fallen into the rabbit hole of using home-automation. The obvious choice is Home Assistant and I've enjoyed the journey a lot so far. This blag post documents my process of automating all those crappy remote controlled gadget that accumulated in the house: that cheap light bulb, those cheap fairy lights, or that cheap LED strip … you might know what I mean. The remotes come in all forms and sizes and are often quite thin, powered by a button cell, and work occasionally. I have a literal box full of them.
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All right, the last step to complete the great Sourdough Monitoring Project (SMP): capturing actual footage. We don't need a real video but just a sequence of still images. The goal is to collect enough of those on disk to later be able to assemble them into a time-laps video of the dough growing.
First I'll show you how to enable camera support in software, then how to attach the camera, and finally finally how to capture images to disk. As a bonus, I'll share a PHP script you can use to receive images on a server on the internet so you can look at your dough from the other side of the world.
Take a peek.
This is me again, having no idea about electronics and trying to get a Raspberry Pi to record the temperature of its surroundings in order to better control the environment of the previously mentioned sourdough.
Get bakin'!
I want to create a stop motion movie of sourdough growing over night. Don't ask. Since I'm very comfortable with the OS, I am using Raspberry Pi as the hardware platform. And since everyone will tell you that _Lighting_ is important for any kind of filmmaking I played around with ways to toggle power on the USB ports to control USB-powered lamps.
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Run
grep Revision /proc/cpuinfo
This blag post describes how to use a [Raspberry Pi](http://amzn.to/2wjICvo) to remotely "press" and potentially "hold" the power button on a PC. This is my first non-trivial (still pretty-trivial) hardware-related project. So don't expect anything too fancy.
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I finally decided to set up a real router in front of my router. The main use cases, I wanted to cover were the following:
* nice local domain names: Since I run a FritzBox (which is a pretty common plastic router in Germany), all local host names (sometimes!) get suffixed by .fritz.box. This domain cannot be configured to .something.awesome and the whole setup is quite in-transparent, that I could not figure out, in which cases, the suffix is mandatory when resolving host names.
* play around with [snort](https://www.snort.org/).
* bandwidth monitoring: to replace the current workflow of randomly killing machines, when the internet connection is slow and one needs bandwidth to do something important™.
In this blog post I will cover nothing of this. Instead, I'll explain, how I set up a RaspberryPi to enable me to do all the above in the future. Do you want to know more?