Blog
Referring to the post I published a couple of weeks ago, I’ve decided to share my way of measuring energy consumption. I’ve got a pretty standard setup consisting of a 3-phase energy meter outside the flat. It’s not very handy when it comes to integrating it with Home Assistant, so I bought a cheap 3-phase energy meter instead and installed it internally. It has a single pulse output with 800…
I’ve heard a couple of stories recently about people switching to G13 energy tariff saving money on energy bills even without changing their energy usage patterns and habits. I’ve decided to check it on my own, as I already have an energy meter connected to Home Assistant. As the first step, I thought it’d be a good idea to split the counter into three categories: morning peak, afternoon peak, and…
As you may have heard, Biedronka (the largest supermarket chain in Poland) is offering a $10 smart socket. They claim with the device you can remotely control anything up to 16 A (3680 W), monitoring the power usage too. I bought a few Sonoff Pows for this purpose before, and I couldn’t get them for less than $15 if I remember correctly. Also, the PP-W162 is much more compact and it doesn’t need…
I currently work on a ThinkPad T450 , after switching back from Dell XPS series recently. It’s a decent piece of hardware in general, it has everything I could expect from an ultrabook except for one tiny little detail. For me, the main reason to upgrade to a newer model would be the USB C port so I could have a single power adapter for all my devices. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to fix it.…
I’ve recently replaced my Nexus 5X with a Xiaomi Mi 5, just before 5X dies in a bootloop like everyone else’s does. Both devices have USB Type C ports, so you can just use whatever Type C charger for both without worrying which one is for LG and which one is for Xiaomi, right? Well, almost… When you connect the Xiaomi’s charger (black cable) to the Nexus phone, and Nexus’ charger (white cable) to…
I’ve spent a while today trying to set up ActiveStorage in a new Rails application properly. The current Rails guides suggest to declare the following service in config/storage.yml file: google: service: GCS credentials: type: "service_account" project_id: "" private_key_id: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:gcs, :private_key_id) %> private_key: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:gcs,…
If you happen to break your MK42 heatbed, like I did a week ago, there’s a non-obvious way of getting it back to life. I accidentally cut the PEI layer and damaged one of the heating circuits in the middle of the PCB , when using a very sharp tool to peel the print off the bed. Even though there’s more than one circuit on the board, breaking just one of them means that your heatbed won’t have…
I’ve been watching the 3D printing world for quite some time now, browsing through RepRap forums, thinking about building my own RepRap printer - a budget way of getting into 3D printing. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it in fact, but there’s one thing about RepRaps that I really like - they give you much better understanding of how 3D printers are implemented internally. It’s something…
A few friends of mine have recently motivated me to spend a while on documenting my experiences with monitoring particulate matter. I live in Gliwice currently, and I’m lucky enough to have an “official” monitoring station 500 m from my apartment. The latest measurement shows PM 2.5 concentration of 644 µg/m³ at noon, and it’s way above the limits established by the EU or WHO . This is a huge…
I just wanted to see what happens if a short appears in the circuit - to check if the fuses I made really work. Here you go. The first fuse didn’t blow, because fuses are on both sides of the module - some on the negative side blew, breaking the circuit. One more thing to check is to see how much current actually went through the wire. I’ll try to get a proper ammeter soon and repeat the test.