Sean's projects, musings and general information
As of version 0.80 of Home assistant, there is a new web hook trigger for automations. I already setup the Git Pull add-on to automatically pull the latest config from my gitlab. However, when I’m building stuff, my workflow goes like this: Add + test new gadgets to home assistant on my laptop Commit +… Continue Reading Home Assistant, Git Plugin and Web Hooks
As a part of my home automation, I want to collect data on our Power, Gas and water usage. I already covered the power usage in a previous post, so this will describe my setup to monitor our water usage. Fortunately, our gas meter (Pipersberg G4 RF1 c) and water meter (Sensus 620) both have… Continue Reading ESP8266 + Gas / Water monitoring
This is the third part in my series of scraping data from the local police department, to gather crime statistics over time. Part 1 covers the collection of the images Part 2 covers the finding of the pins on the image Part 3 (This part) will cover determining where the pins are geographically located Part… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 3
This is part two in my quest to determine the long-term crime statistics, in the city where I intend to buy a house. Click here for part one, where I collect the images weekly from the police’s site. In this step, I’ll pick the images out of the S3 bucket, and attempt to find all the… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 2
I want to buy a house in a nice neighbourhood. My local police department provides statistics, but they only offer a static image with the weekly break-ins superimposed on a map. I contacted them to see if they could provide the raw data used to produce their map. They said that this is not something… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 1
I have a few old DNS-323 that I picked up for cheap. Although they are around 10 years old (as of 2016), thanks to some community firmware, they support drives larger than 2Tb. They’re not fast, but as a remote backup target they’re an excellent choice, since they can do OpenVPN, as well as rsync. One major limitation… Continue Reading DNS-323 Autostart after Power Failure
Tl;Dr: You can use these cheap Wifi RGB Modules from AliExpress/Ebay, and with a custom firmware they will speak MQTT and can be updated OTA as well as used for other features as desired. Download a copy of my custom firmware here, connect with the programming pads in the diagram here, configure Arduino to flash to… Continue Reading Hacked ESP8266 RGB LED Controller
We haven’t used cable / satellite since 2006. Unfortunately, some online streaming services have restrictions, so when we visit them we must appear to be in a different location. Until now, we have been successfully using our existing server and VPN intrastructure (where this site his hosted for example), to additionally have a Squid proxy… Continue Reading Beyond Proxies: Cheaply routing traffic to another country to avoid Geo Restrictions for ~$20/year
Amazon in the US has a deal, where you can get a small button for $5. The marketing behind the button is, you can press it and it connects to amazon, and orders you a new package of something you have pre-selected. As a geek, all I see is a gadget that is simple, has a… Continue Reading Amazon Dash + OpenHAB for mail delivery notifications
A quick little thing I did as a weekend project was to connect our washing machine to the Internet. The washing machine is in the basement, three flights below our apartment. On laundry day, we occasionally try to rotate loads too early and end up going downstairs before the previous load is done. The washing… Continue Reading ESP8266 Internet Enabled Washing Machine