Media - nerd shit - Page 1 | virtualwolf.org

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. 😛

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 (https://github.com/VirtualWolf/esp32-sensor-reader-mqtt) 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

A photo of the box of a Google Nest Hub. It's a white device with a maybe 7"-ish display at an angle attached to a wide base.

So Kristina won a Google Nest Hub from her work today. While there is no fucking way I'm plugging it in and letting Google spy on us, there's a security researcher who hacked one of these to boot Ubuntu: https://fredericb.info/2022/06/breaking-secure-boot-on-google-nest-hub-2nd-gen-to-run-ubuntu.html He popped all the code up on GitHub (https://github.com/frederic/chipicopwn) so I reckon I'll give that a go!

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit google nest

Posted on 14 September 2022, 20:06

A photo of the Pokit Pro box, showing the multimeter itself which looks like REALLY FAT pencil that tapers down and ends in a metal point. The body is dark grey and red. Next to it in clear plastic box is the Arduino starter which has a TON of components visible: resistors, LEDs, cables, a breadboard for connecting the components to, a couple of segmented LED displays, and more stuff visible under that that you can't make out.

Yaaaay, the "Pokit Pro" multimeter I backed back at the end of 2019 finally arrived! I got the one that comes with the Arduino starter kit and holy crap is there a lot more stuff in it than I was expecting. 😮

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit pokit pro arduino

Posted on 23 June 2022, 12:38

A screenshot showing a bunch of multi-coloured panels with sparklines behind them showing current temperature and humidity readings for the four AM2302 sensors we have, details of our power usage and solar production, air quality, plus the maximum and minimum temperatures for today and the total amount of power we've produced, consumed, imported from the grid, and exported to the grid.

A screenshot showing a bunch of graphs for the temperature/humidity, power usage, and air quality.

I've been having entirely too much fun overhauling my dashboard in Grafana this weekend.

screenshot nerd shit grafana

Posted on 6 March 2022, 19:44