RSSAmplifier

Blog

Jack Lewis

Blog

jacklew.isRSS feed ↗7 posts

Latest posts

Booting Home Assistant OS on TrueNAS/bhyve

I love using Home Assistant to control all of my smart home devices and create cool automations. But I’ve found that running it on Raspberry Pis or even the Home Assistant Blue to be somewhat unreliable. In the case of Raspberry Pis, they boot from SD cards which are notoriously unreliable. In the case of the Home Assistant Blue, it boots from an internal eMMC card, which is better but still not…

Using Tail Call Optimization in Node.js

Everyone who has used recursion has probably seen something like the following:

How I built a keyboard by hand

I had spare mechanical keyboard switches and keycaps from other keyboard projects, and I wanted to see if it would be feasible to build a keyboard using only hand tools. I started with some aluminum sheet stock from the hardware store. It was perfectly sized to build a 5 column, 13 row grid keyboard, without any wasted space. I started by laying out where the switch holes would be cut. The holes…

Arduino Temperature Sensor

I previously worked on an enclosure for the Computer Club server rack, and I thought it would be a good idea to put together a standalone temperature sensor system. Preferably it would interface over the internet so that IRC bots and other programs could talk to it. Here is the project, using an Arduino Uno for testing. The project will use four DHT-11 temperature sensors, an ATMega 328 with an…

3D Printed Servo Deadbolt Opener

I wanted to design a part that would allow a common hobby servo to unlock a deadbolt. You could then use RFID or some other means of authentication to open a door. I used the larger size available at Radio Shack. To start, I designed this mount in OpenSCAD, to be bolted or double side taped to a door, over the deadbolt: Then I needed a cup to fit over the deadbolt handle. I designed the included…

Raspberry Pi Door Opener Redux

Here is an outside view of the door. All that is visible is the card reader. The code I’ve written for this project is available here . New Room, New Door Opener When the Computer Club moved rooms, I wanted to improve the software that I had written for the door opener. It also turned out that the existing door opener was not able to open the new door. The old handle was very easy to turn, but the…

Raspberry Pi Door Opener

New version of the project I have done a new version of the project, you can read about it here.