Media - nerd shit - Page 1 | virtualwolf.org

The "middle chaos" photo of our home office: there is a standing desk pulled entirely out from the wall, four ethernet cables running from the wall into the router that's sitting under the standing desk, plus a bunch of cables and external hard disks, a Mac mini, and a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room, as well as a printer sitting on the chair. Beside the standing desk is a bookshelf with the bottom two shelves empty where the printer, Mac mini, and external hard disks live.

The finished glorious neatness: the standing desk is back against the wall, the printer, Mac mini, hard disks, and router are neatly back on the bookshelf, and the big power board has all its power plugs neatly labelled. Four of the cables (the three hard disks and the Raspberry Pi) are actually fed into a cable organiser that takes them up behind the bookshelf, and the four ethernet cables are neatly tied together. The only slightly messy bit are the four power cables coming down from the standing desk into a second powerboard, but even they're mostly tied together.

We had the electrician in yesterday to run a bunch of new ethernet cable for our new network setup with the additional wifi access points. Yesterday evening after dinner we went out and bought two big 12-port Arlec powerboards with two USB-A and two USB-C ports in them to neaten up the lounge room power setup, and the office too because I was going to move the router there but we'd run out of ports on the existing boards. I spent the rest of yesterday evening after we got home doing the lounge room, at lunch today I wall-mounted and tidied up the access point in the back room, and then this evening pulled EVERYTHING in the office apart and redid it all.

Witness the absolute chaos of the middle of it, and then the glorious neatness afterwards, I even labelled all of the power cables to indicate what they're for!

Posted on 12 February 2025, 22:41

A photo of a round white UFO-looking UniFi access point mounted on the wall, with an ethernet cable coming out of the bottom of it. There's a blue circle of LED in the middle, looking all cool and futuristic (he says as the table is moved in front of that piece of wall so you can't actually even see the thing is there anyway).

An absolute mess of mostly ethernet cables, plus a power cable, an RCA cable, and a small white D-Link switch sitting on the floor, looking very rat-nesty.

Well, the one for the lounge room was easy because there's already a cable coming straight from the Dream Router to where I wanted to mount the new access point anyway. And with being able to move everything to wireless because there's now a properly solid signal here, and moving the Raspberry Pi directly behind the TV because the only thing it needs to plug into is power and the amplifier, I've been able to clean out a whole rat's nest of cables.

This Power-over-Ethernet thing is pretty sweet, isn't it?

our house darkroom nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 21:45

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of the box of a 10TB Seagate external hard disk. The enclosure is basically a big featureless black box with a little white bit going over where the front USB port is.

This should keep us going for a while! Good upgrade from 4TB. 😛

our house nerd shit photos.app

Posted on 26 October 2024, 10:05

A photo of two blue circuit board modules (a BME280 temperature/humidity/air pressure sensor and an ENS160 indoor air quality sensor) that are 2.5cm by 2.5cm, and two of the Adafruit microcontrollers that are packed full of little components and are even smaller, 2cm by 2.5cm.

Moar microcontroller goodies! (20¢ coin for scale.)

These are Adafruit's QT Py RP2040s and oh my god they're so tiny, they're even smaller than the PiicoDev sensor boards! I'm going to use them with the 3x LED module boards I have to give us a status light for each of outdoor dew point, outdoor air quality, and indoor air quality.

(Update: Oh goddammit. I'm so used to playing with my ESP32 stuff that I completely blanked that not all RP2040 boards come with wifi, and these don't. 🤦🏻‍♀️)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit microcontroller

Posted on 1 May 2024, 14:41

A screenshot of a Grafana dashboard showing a gauge panel with the air quality index at 3 (it ranges from 1-5, 1 being good and 5 being very bad), and two spark graphs showing the equivalent CO2 (currently 761 parts per million) and the total volatile organic compounds readings (currently 258 parts per billion).

My ESP32 hacking has continued and I've updated my code to support the ScioSense ENS160 indoor air quality sensor! It measures eCO2, total volatile organic compounds, and gives an air quality index value based on those two readings.

Given that you can daisy-chain I2C devices to connect more than one to a single board, I also changed how my sensor reader repo works and now you can specify multiple sensors and it'll read from all of them and send each reading to a different MQTT topic. So now we have the BME280 temperature/humidity sensor AND the ENS160 air quality sensor hooked up to the ESP32 in the lounge room, and of course I've added a section on my Grafana dashboard to display the data. 😁

My next stop is to bodge together some wiring so I can use the outdoor (nice STEMMA QT connector) BME280 sensor on the same board as the outdoor (standard pins, not I2C) PMS5003 air quality sensor, and not have to have two separate ESP32s for the both of them.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 27 April 2024, 21:59

A photo of two large hardcover books, "The Art and Soul of Dune" and "The Art and Soul of Dune Part Two", and a plastic box with a "PiicoDev Starter Kit" sticker on the front showing several small blue circuit boards connected together with wires (it contains a bunch of sensors and wires and bits to do MicroPython electronics projects with).

Birthday goodies!

books our house diy darkroom presents nerd shit esp32 dune

Posted on 20 April 2024, 10:17

A photo of a plastic box with a "PiicoDev Starter Kit" sticker on the front showing several small blue circuit boards connected together with wires. It's got various sensors and cables in it that you can use to hook up to a MicroPython board and generally do little electronics projects with.

New toys!

...that need to get packed away now because they're a birthday present. #FirstWorldProblems

our house diy new toys nerd shit esp32

Posted on 8 April 2024, 13:43

A screenshot from my Grafana dashboard showing two "gauge" type panels, one for the dew point and one for the atmospheric pressure.

I did a bunch more hacking on my ESP32 sensor reader code today, deployed the new BME280 into "production" outside, and got my Grafana dashboards updated! And I was able to do it completely successfully without needing to actually plug the ESP32s into my computer to update anything, the remote-updating code worked a treat.

The new sensor is remarkably close to what the Bureau of Meteorology is reporting: the sensor says it's 17.5˚C, 95% humidity, dew point of 16.6˚C and atmospheric pressure of 1017hPa, versus the BoM that says the temperature is 17.8˚C, 94% humidity, dew point of 16.8˚C, and atmospheric pressure of 1019hPa.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 5 April 2024, 21:50

A photo of the box of the Dream Router. The router itself looks like a little squat white cylinder with a ring around the top and a gently curved top and bottom.

New router day! A Ubiquiti "Dream Router".

Our current router is a six year-old Netgear D7800 running OpenWRT and appears to be slowly dying because increasingly often the entire wireless radio just... drops. Like, no devices can see any of the networks, then it'll come back a minute later. Last time this happened we actually had to power-cycle the router entirely because it didn't come back at all.

And while I like the flexibility of OpenWRT, I've managed to fuck things up on a couple of occasions and it feels more like I'm needing to be a sysadmin versus it just being an appliance.

our house darkroom new toys router nerd shit

Posted on 6 June 2023, 12:53