Karl's little corner of the internet
Converting a PurpleAir Classic to ESPHome I still don’t 100% know what the issue is but for the past several months, my PurpleAir Classic sensor has been incredibly flakey when it comes to reporting data. Home Assistant would report random bouts of “timeouts” while trying to poll the sensor and that would result in gaps in the data. In the best case, the gaps were only a few…
Loading a certificate onto Avigilon without using CCT I recently won an auction for a used Avigilon camera with the intention of replacing my cheap Reolink cameras with something a bit more “pro” and that would integrate better with Home Assistant. This isn’t going to be a “review” of the camera or an analysis of the firmware, just a quick “I googled, found…
Two Minute Teardown: USB-C charged AAA battery First, these things have existed for quite a few years now but people still seem to be discovering them. If you are one of todays lucky 10,000 people to find out about them , you’re welcome. I hope these can change your mind about rechargeable batteries; they’re good, now! One of mine started failing with intermittent output voltage so I…
Corporate Systems Engineering SSHAAC00-S041911 Electric utilities can employ “load shed” devices throughout their grid to manage load. These devices are usually found on air conditioners, water heaters, pool pumps and other large electrical loads. Typically they’ll offer you a small financial incentive to allow the utility to cycle your device off for short periods of time during…
Frigate: Kubernetes edition This is a follow up to my ‘Frigate From Scratch’ post . Most of that post is still relevant today but I have since moved almost all of my workloads into Kubernetes. This post is intended to document some of the issues I hit while trying to get Frigate running in my k8s cluster. This is not every issue I hit, just the ones that are not directly related to my…
Introduction Bit of a change in format; instead of one massive post for all the misc. 11-11 teardowns, I’m grouping them. This post is the “LED Controller” group. I managed to snag the following on Ali Express: Gledepto GL-C-618WL LED Controller IoTorero LS11PDual LED Controller SMLIGHT-A1-SLWF-09 LED Controller To continue from last year’s trend , I waned to celebrate that…
Two Minute Teardown: SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 To make a very long story short, I need to move away from my very old 802.15.4 radios plugged into a very old Raspberry Pi for my smart home setup. After some research, the SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 is new, uses modern radios and ships with firmware that makes it trivial to move packet processing into compute distributed on the other end of the network .…
Two Minute Teardown: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard Disregard note below about 1.0.5 To make a long story short, I allocated a few hours to build a tool that can read/write the SFP module’s EEPROM . I then wired this up to a logic analyzer and compared the read/write operations to what the SFP Wizard does when it tries to unlock a module. TL;DR: I didn’t see a meaningful difference in what my…
Two Minute Teardown: Hamgeek YK-1000H NTP Curiosity got the better of me when browsing AliExpress and I spotted this GPS NTP server for under $100 USD. I needed a cart-stuffer anyways so I ordered one as a backup for my existing GPS/NTP server. While waiting, I took a look around to see if there was any additional information about who makes this / if there was a custom firmware or similar. Nope,…
Two Minute Teardown: Duogalia A-M70 Optical Fiber Multi-Meter While diagnosing a flakey fiber link, i ran into a situation where a basic “flashing red” visual fault finder was not sufficient. I needed to actually measure the optical power levels on both ends of the link to ensure that the fiber was not damaged and that the SFPs were operating within spec. This was the cheapest tool…