Recent content on BlocNotes
Introduction I have been experimenting with solar panels, Home Assistant and my electricity meter lately. This French meter from the utility is called Linky. It provides a small power supply (130 mW) and a serial link hidden via amplitude modulation. To avoid using batteries, I built a prototype that harvests this power, demodulates the serial link, and feeds the data into an nRF52 development…
Introduction I recently bought a Cubii under desk elliptical bike, I have two use cases for it: Physiotherapy after a foot surgery Help me to warm-up in my cold home office in the winter Added bonus, doing light exercise. I definitely not find it as enjoyable as using a full size machine, or doing “real” sports, but this is just my preference and I am stuck at home with crutches anyway…
I own a Rika Filo pellet stove, which I like, but it is on the expensive side of the market and the Wi-Fi module to remote control it was a no-go. This article describes the way I reverse-engineered the radio protocol. As it is my sole heating system and winter is coming, I wanted a non invasive approach to avoid breaking anything, so I hooked up a logic analyzer to record the commands sent by the…
Kongduino kindly sent me a WisDuo RAK3272s few weeks ago, it is a a breakout board for RAK nice module ( RAK3172 ) around the STM32WL5 system on chip from ST. Let’s see how to use STM32 CubeMX to generate the initialization files and the LoRaWAN stack, then setup Visual Studio code debugger. 1. STM32 CubeMX Download STM32 CubeMX from ST website, install it as instructed. Open it then create…
I recently bought a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus from iTead to use it with Home Assistant. While it worked out of the box, the update itself was not complicated but you have to find the right tools… Update the firmware The nice Python script cc2538-bsl can be used, but the branch feature/ITead_Sonoff_Zigbee-delay needs to be selected until the pull request is merged. Install cc2538-bsl…
I went down the hole of installing Linux on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S7). The easiest path is compiling and installing UBports , some people have heavily started the process but it is still a work in progress. This is the first part: step by step description to build and boot the system, with helpers scripts to setup the system once flashed. UBports screenshot The first part is my notes gathered…
Small hacky script to set regular temperature changes in 3D printer gcode, to easily use “ Temperature towers ”. Temperature tower I personally use this one , which is a bit small but fast to print. Usage Use is simple: Slice your temperature tower with filament temperature set to the highest temperature Export your gcode to a file, ex: tower.gcode Run the python script with correct…
nfcAudio is an MP3 player, with audio files selected thanks to an NFC tag placed on top of it. I build this two years ago for my kid so he can play by himself his preferred nursery rhymes and songs, it is still used at least once a week :-) It is powered by an ESP8266 to play audio from a remote server, an I2S DAC driving the speaker and an NFC reader. Thanks to WiFi we can use it to play local…
For the fifth year of this blog, I switched from Ghost to Hugo . I used to like Ghost as a small and simple tool when I started the blog. Ghost is now a powerful content management system but far more complex than the simple tool I am looking for, even writing a full post in markdown became less and less easy over the years. As I do not need fancy stuff and like the simplicity to pre-generate the…
I had to move my previous Wireguard VPN + Pi-hole ad blocker to another server, but this time I was not able to expose Pi-hole DNS port (53) to the host machine. It was also better to have Wireguard VPN inside a Docker container… so I did! As a reminder, Wireguard is a stateless and easy to configure VPN: share a pair of public keys between the client(s) and server then you are good to go!…