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. [Read More]
IoT  Wemos D1 Mini  Surveillance 

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: [Read More]
Linux  Howto  Docker  IoT  Raspberry Pi  3D Printing  Docker Swarm 

Arduinos, Arduinos everywhere!

 Posted on May 22, 2017  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  5 minutes  |  944 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Introduction I’ve been quiet for the past months, mostly because of summer, but also because I’ve been busy getting (re)aquatinted with circuit design. I haven’t played around with electronics in 20 years, but when I recently got my hands on an Arduino “starter kit” I just had to try it out. My go-to platform for solving home automation has been the Raspbery Pi, but RPi’s have a tendency to fail. There’s the good old SD Card failing, and recently I’ve had a lot of USB resets. [Read More]
IoT  Arduino  Surveillance 

New Toys

 Posted on December 1, 2016  (Last modified on May 20, 2017)  |  3 minutes  |  570 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Controlling a 3D printer with a Raspberry Pi Preface I finally got around to getting a shiny new toy in the form of a 3D Printer. The specific model is a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus. While it may not be the best in terms of quality, it’s a nice “little” printer that, after a lot of tinkering, produces some fair prints. I’ve had my fair share of problems with it, for starters every bolt needed tightening upon unpacking, add to that an uneven printbed, and the general “confusion” following playing around in uncharted territory, and it pretty much sums up my first 4 weeks with it. [Read More]
IoT  Raspberry Pi  3D Printing  Octoprint  Octopi 

Scheduling lights with Phillips Hue revisited

 Posted on May 27, 2016  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  4 minutes  |  850 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

When i last looked into automating the light control, i was using IFTTT, and decided to write my own implementation because IFTTT was not very precise, and rather limited for the finegrained control i wanted. A year has passed, and there’s a new version of the Phillips Hue Bridge which supports Apple HomeKit, and has a new version of the Hue API, which supports things like sunrise/sunset triggers. My own solution has been running on my Raspberry Pi for the better part of a year, and has worked very well, but with the new API it is possible for me to create the schedules directly on the Hue Bridge, removing the dependency on the Server, and allowing interaction from the Hue Apps. [Read More]
IoT  Philips Hue 

Playing Around with Go

 Posted on February 28, 2016  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  6 minutes  |  1195 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

I’ve previously described my temperature monitoring solution, written in Python, and I’ve also described my various attempts at optimizing this solution, using NodeRED and Apache Camel, but all of these attempts have been focused on the server side, while the client has been mostly left to itself. The client runs on an old Raspberry Pi B+, with a total of 256MB RAM. The RPi also runs a surveillance camera, via the RPi camera module, which requires a memory split of 128 MB. [Read More]
Monitoring  IoT  Raspberry Pi  Go 

Monitoring temperatures with Apache Camel

 Posted on December 29, 2015  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  3 minutes  |  546 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Intro I’ve been trying out various technologies for my temperature monitoring project, but all of them have been more or less unstable. The python solution is by far the most robust, but can lose connection to the MQTT broker, and stubbornly refuse to reconnect by itself. The Node-RED solution is, while fast to write, notoriously unstable regarding MQTT connections. Connections sit “idle” showing a connected state, while in fact they are disconnected, and there is no obvious way of reconnecting it - apart from restarting the docker container. [Read More]
Monitoring  MQTT  Paho  node-RED  IoT  Raspberry Pi  Apache Camel 

Temperature monitoring with Node-RED

 Posted on September 4, 2015  |  2 minutes  |  313 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

I originally wrote my temperature monitoring software using Python, and while my Python solution works (almost) flawlessly, I recently became aware of Node-RED, a project initiated at IBM, meant as a controller for the Internet of things. When i read about Node-RED i wanted to try it out, so i decided to port my temperature/surveillance monitoring solution from python to Node-RED, and while i’m not much of a JavaScript fan, it actually worked out rather well. [Read More]
Monitoring  MQTT  node-RED  IoT