Modernizing my homelab for Europes 2022 energy crisis
Posted on October 12, 2022
| 13 minutes
| 2635 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Intro. It should come as no surprise that Europe is currently undergoing it’s worst energy crisis since the 1970s. While power has always been somewhat expensive here, at least when compared to our US friends, running a small homelab was possible without starving. The current electricity prices are fluctuating between €0.5 and €1.3 per kWh, meaning that power hungry computer equipment has suddely become really expensive to run.
As a small example, simply powering an 8 port UniFi US-8-60W requires around 16W excluding POE power draw.
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I moved my NAS to the cloud
and you could too
Posted on March 25, 2021
| 12 minutes
| 2519 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
This blog has been in a state of neglect for a long time. Not because I meant to, but as they say “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans“, and life has been happening a lot to me these past few years. To the point where I’ve had little time for personal projects, and when I finally made something, it either turned out to be a bad idea, or not in a state I wanted to show.
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Controlling a PWM fan with esp8266
Posted on May 1, 2018
| 10 minutes
| 1952 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Intro My home lab lives in a closet. - It’s not ideal, but it’s what i’ve got.
Originally, when we designed that part of the house, the room was meant to be a “storage room”, and as such, i had all the ethernet plugs routed to a panel in the wall of this room. A year later our youngest son came into this world, and along with his arrival he claimed the room as his.
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Raspberry Pi Cryptocurrency Tracker
Creating a cryptocurrency tracker with a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Waveshare e-Paper Hat
Posted on February 18, 2018
| 13 minutes
| 2673 words
| Assertion Failed
Some years ago i got into the world of Crypto Currencies by accident when the company i work for was investigating the Blockchain technology for our own use, and since i knew nothing about Crypto Currencies or Blockchains at the time, i went ahead and bought around $100 worth of Bitcoins.
I then forgot all about it for a couple of years, and only remembered when i was replacing my phone, and the wallet app popped up.
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Measuring Sound Pressure with Esp8266
Posted on January 7, 2018
| 8 minutes
| 1672 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
As a part of my workplace’s tranformation to Agile Development we have quarterly “Program Increment” meetings, where a hundred people will sit in a large meeting room for 2 days, trying to figure out what we’re going to be doing for the next 3 months.
I won’t be commenting on the effectiveness of this method, only on the fact that these meetings tend to be accompanied by a lot of noise.
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Migrating From Ghost to Hugo (Again)
Posted on October 5, 2017
| 5 minutes
| 1011 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
A year ago i migrated from Ghost to Hugo, and about the same time my rate of publishing dropped dramatically. A part of this is because most of my writing is done in small bursts, opening the Ghost editor whenever i have 10-20 minutes. With Hugo this wasn’t really possible (for me), and most of my issues with Ghost (upgrading) became voided by running the official Docker image
Fast forward a year, and Ghost has released version 1.
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Securing a collocated Raspberry Pi 2 (or 3)
Posted on August 31, 2017
| 20 minutes
| 4240 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
My original HowTo was written in 2013 when i got a free hosted Raspberry Pi B+. I wrote the article mostly for myself as a reminder on how to set it up. Over the years it has proven quite usable, and not just for myself. Whenever i’ve been messing things up with this blog, and articles have gone missing, that article is the one that keeps being requested.
With that in mind, i figured i would update it to a 2017 version, using newer packages.
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Graphing Raspberry Pi performance with sar
Posted on August 24, 2017
(Last modified on September 11, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 353 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
As part of monitoring the general health of my Raspberry Pi boxes, i like keeping a historical image of how the load was at a given time. I have real time monitoring in place, which will alert me via Pushover if something goes haywire1, and my surveillance does it’s own checking and alerts (via the same pushover container) if a sensor fails to report within a given period.
I based my graph generating script on the one described here, though the memory calculation in that script is not what i wanted, and this being a memory restricted platform, i also wanted to monitor swap in/out.
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More toys.
Posted on August 17, 2017
| 3 minutes
| 457 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Shortly after getting into the wonderful world of 3D printing, i realised that not all 3D Printers are created equal. After starting a print i went to get work done, and kept a window running with a webcam, when i noticed smoke coming out of the extruder.
It turns out that (most) Chinese printers don’t have basic security features like MINTEMP and Thermal Runaway enabled, meaning if a thermistor fails to obtain a reading, it will return 0, causing the printer to heat even more to obtain the desired temperature.
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Running a Docker Swarm on a Raspberry Pi Cluster.
Posted on August 10, 2017
(Last modified on August 29, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 1026 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
For a long time i’ve wanted to experiment with running a small cluster on my Raspberry Pi’s, but I’ve always had lots of other things to do. Recently i started moving my hosted services from my NAS onto a single Raspberry Pi, and came across a few older Raspberry Pi’s, and thought now is a good a time as any, so here goes.
Hardware used I used the following components:
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