Cian Gallagher is a software engineer based out of Dublin, Ireland. I have had many different roles over the years, including being a web developer, fullstack engineer, and site reliability engineer across a number of different companies.
How I Taught a Raspberry Pi to Read My Gas Meter If you’d prefer to watch the full video, please click below! Every month, I have to crawl into a cupboard under my stairs, point a torch at my gas meter, and read off eight tiny digits to send to my energy supplier. So I did the only reasonable thing: I put a camera in the cupboard and taught a computer to do it for me . In this post I’ll take you…
“Hey Billy!” – Turning a Singing Fish into a Smart Voice Assistant with ESP32 and Home Assistant You can watch the full video below, if you prefer ;) Voice assistants are everywhere — Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri — but let’s be honest: most of them sound a little dull and lifeless. So I asked myself: how can I make one with a bit more personality? Enter Billy Bass , the singing fish — or, as he’s…
Build Your Own ESP8266 Infrared Smart Controller If you’d prefer to watch the full video, please click below! Have you ever wanted to turn your old infrared-controlled devices — like your TV, stereo, or air conditioner — into something smart ? In this tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how to build an ESP8266-based infrared controller that can both receive signals from your existing remote and…
Building a CO2 Sensor with a Pi PicoW & Automating Home Ventilation: Part 2 In this second post, I’ll take you through how (and why) I set up Apache Flink, InfluxDB, and used Grafana & MQTT (mostly running in a Kubernetes cluster!) to display (and eventually use!) our Co2, temperature, and pressure data. Let’s get into it. What do I want to achieve? Now that I have my fan unit installed, (link to…
Building a CO2 Sensor with a Pi PicoW & Automating Home Ventilation: Part 1 tldr; I built this DIY home CO2 monitor to help me stay alert during my working day, and to ensure clean air ventilation throughout my home. I’m also going to show you how I took this data and built an automated ventialtion system using single room heat recovery units, Apache Flink , Kubernetes, InfluxDb and Grafana. I’ll…
Switchboard v1.0.0 & Pro For more information on what Switchboard is, have a read of my last blog post - Introducting Switchboard . Over the past few months, I have been working (on & off) on the the first official release for switchboard, v1.0.0 . This release adds a number of new features compared to v0.3.0 , including support for IN_CLOSE_WRITE events on linux systems. As well as this, I’ve put…
Switchboard Do you ever get annoyed that your Downloads folder gets cluttered with all types of files and folders? Are your images scattered across various places on your machine and you just wish they could be organised into one place? Switchboard is a tool here to help you organise files on your machine. Motivation As aptly described above, I built switchboard out of a frustration with the…
This post was originally published to medium.com in april 2018. You can find a link to the original article at the bottom of this page. If you’re like me, you’ve mused over the idea of travelling the world in style. You’ve seen the Youtube video’s, and you know the people. This is a story of how I found a bug in the Avios Travel Rewards Programme that would have allowed me to achieve that*. A…
Building your own MVC Framework in PHP (Part 3) Posted on Wednesday 2nd July 2014 Hello, I’m back again with the 3rd installation of my MVC Framework in PHP series, again apologies that it took so long! Now without further ado, let’s get straight into it! We left of last time having created our index page view. What I’m going to show you today is how to render an existing page chosen, as well as…
Building your own MVC Framework in PHP (Part 2) Posted on Friday 11th April 2014 Welcome back! Sorry it’s been awhile, but let’s get straight back into it! Last time, we left off with our initial main index.php file in our Controllers folder. Let’s take a step forward and go to our libs folder which we created at the start, and let’s create a file called init.php within the folder. Next we’re…