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.
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Monitoring temperatures with a Raspberry Pi.
Posted on June 26, 2015
(Last modified on September 3, 2015)
| 4 minutes
| 744 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently got into a discussion about dogs, kennels and temeratures. I have a German Shepherd, and he has a nice insulated dog house in his kennel, and the discussion was along the lines, how much heat does it take to warm up the doghouse, if it gets hotter than the outside at all.
Now, a normal person would have solved this by putting a wireless meat thermometer in the doghouse, made a few readings of it with/without the dog, and compare it to the outside temperature.
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Replacing my Raspberry Pi 2 with my Synology NAS and Docker
Posted on April 10, 2015
(Last modified on May 22, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 418 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently moved my server from a 2012 Mac Mini to a Raspberry Pi 2, and while the Pi 2 has been doing a great job, another option recently became available to me.
I’ve been a long time user of Synology NAS products. Their products have great uptime, along with superior performance, mobile apps, file sharing etc.
I’ve been using them since 2001, and have only had a single unit fail on me.
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Replacing my old server with a Raspberry Pi 2
Posted on March 6, 2015
(Last modified on April 15, 2015)
| 3 minutes
| 540 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve been running a server at home for as long as i can remember. Over the years, the tasks performed by the server has varied greatly, from a complete mail/web/file server, to file/streaming/backup, and in it’s most recent incarnation, streaming/backup.
Somewhere along the way (2008 or so), a Synology NAS snuck in, “hijacked” all our data, and streams to AirPlay and Chromecast devices.
For the past 8 years, my server has been a Mac Mini, replaced every 3-5 years with the latest model.
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Sending notifications with MQTT and Pushover.net
Posted on February 16, 2015
(Last modified on April 15, 2015)
| 2 minutes
| 416 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve improved a bit on my Pushover.net setup, described in this previous article.
I started using MQTT, namely the Mosquitto broker for sending data to/from my machines, instead of the old point-to-point setup i was using.
MQTT provides publish/subscribe, with messages up to 256MB each. It also features QoS, ranging from 0 - which basically just means the message was sent on the network, to 2, where you have guaranteed delivery of messages to the broker.
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Ubiquiti UniFi AC, Pro and coverage.
Posted on March 22, 2014
(Last modified on January 5, 2015)
| 6 minutes
| 1179 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Preface In my last post i reviewed the Ubiquiti UniFi AP, and while i was rather pleased with the performance, I wasn’t completely happy with the bandwidth available to me.
The UniFi AP has a 100Mbit ethernet interface, and is capable of up to 300Mbit 802.11n, 2.4GHz only.
In real world usage i saw bandwidth of 86Mbit, and while that is enough to stream four simultaneous HD streams, and fully saturate my 50/50 Mbit internet connection, it took a while to transfer files to/from my NAS.
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Ubiquiti UniFi Review
Posted on March 20, 2014
(Last modified on May 22, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 1029 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
The story so far. As i described in my previous post, I recently converted my home router to a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. Now the time has come to converting my Time Capsules (a 3rd generation and a 5th generation), both of which have been running my home WiFi.
While the devices initially worked really well individually, increasing noise from the neighbors, more and more connected devices, and higher bandwidth requirements (streaming especially), eventually made in necessary to add a 2nd access point.
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Ubiquiti Edgemax Dual WAN With Failover Initial Setup
Posted on March 16, 2014
(Last modified on August 29, 2017)
| 8 minutes
| 1525 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Preface A while ago, i decided to convert my home network to more “professional” gear. My existing setup had been performing great for years, but as line speeds continue to increase, and the number of connected devices seem to skyrocket, the network had gotten more and more sluggish, and the recent router hijacks just made me even more determined to get something that i have greater control over.
Years ago i ran my own router on a Soekris net4801 running pfSense, but line speeds eventually got faster than what the Soekris could keep up with, and i ended up on consumer hardware.
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Using Raspberry Pi as a UniFi controller
Posted on March 9, 2014
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 610 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Despite having had relatively high end network products, I’ve had numerous problems getting maximum performance from the network. Because of this, I’ve recently converted my home network from various consumer products to running mostly Ubiquity products, including EdgeMax Routers and UniFi AP.
Part of the UniFi product line is the UniFi Controller, which is an application that sits on your network, and actively monitors your access points. Running it is optional except for various enterprise functions, like guest network hotspot.
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Realtime login monitoring, Part 2
Posted on January 24, 2014
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 636 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
My original script for monitoring had a few issues. While it worked really well for the actual push notifications, it didn’t seem to be able to survive log files being rotated.
I initially settled for a solution where I just scheduled a restart of my service every night after the logfiles rotated, but i hate loose ends, so I rewrote the script, this time using inotify instead of just calling “tail -F” in a subprocess.
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