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 

Raspberry Pi Sense Hat

 Posted on November 24, 2016  (Last modified on May 20, 2017)  |  2 minutes  |  284 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

I recently acquired a Sense Hat, and despite not having much use for it, i decided to have some fun and learning a little along the way. The hardware The Sense-hat is a little Hat for Raspberry Pi’s that contains a bunch of sensors, along with a small 8x8 RGB LED Matrix. It contains the following sensors: Gyroscope Accelerometer Magnetometer Temperature Barometric pressure Humidity Along with the hardware, there’s an official Sense-Hat Python library available. [Read More]
Python  Raspberry Pi  Sense Hat 

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 

Editorial to Hugo workflow

 Posted on April 25, 2016  (Last modified on May 22, 2017)  |  1 minutes  |  212 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

In my previous post i described my new blog setup with Hugo, and mentioned that i loved the Editorial App for iOS for writing on the go. One of the reasons i’m in love with Editorial is the workflows, which combines a simple workflow engine (like Automator for Mac), with the powerfull scripting capabilities of Python. Editorial encourages it’s users to create new workflows, and share them on the Workflow Directory. [Read More]
Hugo  Editorial  Workflow 

There and back again

 Posted on April 25, 2016  |  5 minutes  |  1043 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

A tale of switching blogging platforms Preface I started this blog when i got a “free” Raspberry Pi hosted by the nice people at PCExtreme. Originally this blog was using Octopress because of the limited power provided by the Raspberry Pi and while it was never meant to be a high volume blog, i felt that static pages were the least CPU intensive. As time went by, i became increasingly more and more annoyed with the way Octopress was “a part” of my blog, and updating it involved pulling things from git and rebasing. [Read More]
Ghost  Python  Hugo  Blog Platform 

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 

UniFi Cloud Key review

 Posted on December 19, 2015  (Last modified on August 14, 2017)  |  3 minutes  |  474 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Intro I’ve been running my UniFi controller off of a Raspberry Pi for a couple of years. It’s been running stable, and at no time did i feel it was underpowered for the task. Upgrading was a bit more cumbersome that i would have liked, but in the end it normally didn’t take longer than 10-15 minutes to perform an upgrade. When Ubiquiti announced the Cloud Key, which is essentially a Raspberry Pi 2 in an enclosure, with a POE option, i immediately knew i wanted one. [Read More]

Scheduling lights with Philips Hue and a Raspberry Pi

 Posted on November 13, 2015  (Last modified on December 22, 2015)  |  4 minutes  |  747 words  |  Jimmy Selgen Nielsen

Up until a few weeks ago, i’ve been using IFTTT for controlling various automated light tasks. The lights i want to control are mostly outdoor lights, turning on at dusk, and off again at sunrise. I also automatically tone the light down and into a slight more red color in the kids rooms around bedtime, and in the living room a wee bit later :) IFTTT works, but is not very punctual. [Read More]
Python  Raspberry Pi  Philips Hue