Media - our house - Page 10

A photo of seven ESP32 microcontroller circuit boards sitting on a table. The one on top is the old one and is about 5cm wide and 2cm tall. Underneath it are six of the new boards, each of which are about 2.5cm by 2cm or so. The new ones are ASTOUNDINGLY more compact than the old one.

I'm modernising my ESP32 setup! 🎉 The one on top is one of the old Adafruit HUZZAH32s I'm using at the moment that originally came out in ~2017 and has 520KB RAM, 4MB flash, and a Micro USB connector. The new ones are Adafruit QT Py ESP32s with 2MB of RAM, 8MB of flash, and USB-C.

I have a bit of functionality in my MicroPython code where I can trigger the board to update itself remotely by pulling the files down from GitHub, but unfortunately with the overhead of running MicroPython plus my code itself, I only end up with about 80KB or so free after a fresh reboot and so the update-from-GitHub code frequently runs out of memory and I end up needing to update the code by plugging it directly into the computer. (Which in turns means needing to find out a damn Micro USB to USB-C adapter or cable because all my computers are USB-C now.)

The actual physical cable setup with the old boards is pretty messy too, because even though my sensors are all using the nice compact and clean Stemma QT connector, I have to break those out into individual power, ground, SCL, and SDA cables and plug them individually into the GPIO pins on the board whereas the new QT Py boards have a built-in Stemma QT port on them!

Posted on 21 January 2025, 15:42

A photo of two disgusting Plague Marine miniatures, their armour is painted a khaki green and the trim has been done in a bronze colour. The one on the left is mid-stride and has what looks like a huge flamethrower slung under one arm, and the one on the right is holding a gnarled staff up in one hand and has his other hand out in front of him casting some foul cloud of magic. Both of them are in pox-ridden Space Marine armour, with tentacles and pustules everywhere, and the one on the right with the staff has a huge mouth with massive teeth in the stomach of his armour, and some sort of fleshy/tentacley guts coming out of it.

Well, it might not be fast (I have way too many hobbies competing for way too little time), but I'm finally making some progress on my Plague Marines! As with almost all of Games Workshop's miniatures, the further along with painting I get, the more of the little details I notice (and in this case those details are all gross, haha).

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting death guard

Posted on 20 January 2025, 21:29

Bloody hell this is some ridiculous weather, the lightning is just non-stop! (Apologies for the complete out of focusness, I was shooting through a flyscreen in the dark and had to put it on manual focus and apparently got it wrong. 😅)

The lights very obviously went out for a half second and the aircon and oven reset themselves, but all our computer gear remained online thanks to the battery.

our house video storm kino

Posted on 15 January 2025, 20:32

A photo of the corner of our room where the elliptical is, showing a black wall fan attached to the wall next to the window at about head height, pointing directly at where you stand on the elliptical.

The little fan in our elliptical has been on the fritz for a while now and has finally given out the ghost. Even though it doesn't seem like it'd do much, having that airflow really helped when I'm properly powering along and it's VERY noticeable how much hotter I'm getting without it running. I popped the console off last week and opened it up but it's all pretty well sealed away so I wasn't able to get into the motor itself to figure out what happened (I suspect it's had a bunch of sweat get into it and rust something).

So I decided "Fuck it, let's go whole hog" and ordered a nice big 40cm wall fan, it arrived today and I just mounted it, and it's an absolute unqualified success. I've got it at just the right angle so the whole of my torso gets nice and breezy but it's not blowing directly in my face. 👌🏻 It has three speeds, even at the lowest it's lovely and I've got two higher speeds I can crank it to if need be. Plus it has a little remote that can live underneath the tablet holder on the elliptical so I can turn it up without needing to top and lean awkwardly over.

our house darkroom exercise

Posted on 14 January 2025, 21:26

A photo of the display on our elliptical machine at the end of the workout. It says I've burnt 1382 calories and covered 17.8 kilometres in an hour and eighteen minutes.

Man, these high-budget long TV episodes are certainly a great way to do a hell of a workout. I just finished watching the last episode of Season 1 of Dune: Prophecy, all the prior ones were an hour long but this was nearly an hour twenty. That workout alone was 250% of my move goal for day.

our house darkroom exercise

Posted on 7 January 2025, 16:01

My sensor-activated Raspberry Pi e-ink display setup for the back room is aliiiive! 🎉 AND I managed to write the Raspberry Pi code fully in Python as well. 💪🏻

The ESP32 polls the distance sensor every 50ms and checks to see if the distance read is less than a given threshold (the distance from sensor to floor is about two metres, so I set the threshold to trigger at 1.5m so it'll go off if someone walks through the doorway). If the threshold is breached, it'll send a message to an MQTT topic with a payload indicating that the sensor was triggered and will not send any more messages even if the sensor is triggered again within a user-specified period of time. Once that same user-specified period of time has passed with the distance threshold NOT being breached, it'll send another message to the MQTT topic saying the sensor is no longer triggered.

On the Raspberry Pi side of things, my Python code listens to the MQTT topic that the ESP32 is publishing to, and if it receives a "triggered" message, it checks to see if the display is already on and being updated and will turn it on and start updating every minute if not. Once it receives a "not triggered" message, it'll clear the display so it's effectively "off".

In the video, I set the trigger ignore period to ten seconds which is why it turns back off so quickly, but in ordinary use I have it set to an hour.

I am by no means a professional Python developer, but if you're curious, the code is on Codeberg (ESP32 and Raspberry Pi)).

our house raspberry pi diy darkroom video esp32

Posted on 7 January 2025, 14:08

A selfie of me, a white man with a relatively short but getting somewhat scruffy-looking red beard and short brown hair, wearing a black Fear Factory t-shirt. I'm holding a white Fender Player II Stratocaster electric guitar and smiling at the camera.

You'll have to speak up, I'm playing a guitar. 😎

I finished the bass line this morning, I've got the broad strokes of the rhythm guitar down and just need to record the rest, so now I'm mucking around with the lead. I recorded some lead earlier in the week but listening to it again now I realised it doesn't go, especially with the increased energy of the new bass track, it was just too slow.

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar

Posted on 5 January 2025, 21:26

It's a wee bit angry out there.

our house video thunderstorm kino

Posted on 5 January 2025, 16:50

A photo of a big thick-skinned potato sliced in half and covered in beef mince with healthy dollops of sour cream on top.

Aw yiss, NYE dinner was baked potatoes done in the air fryer with Mexican-seasoned mince on top and sour cream, so good! 👌🏻

our house darkroom food portrait mode

Posted on 31 December 2024, 19:34

A photo of a smallish room, with stuff against all of the walls but in a neat and tidy and actually arranged fashion, and without a bunch of dust and leaves on the floor.

Did some cleaning and tidying for the final day of 2024: I finally got around to donating Beanie's old stuff to our local vet who were very grateful and assured me they'd be put to good use. The woman who helped me bring the stuff in said in particular that some of their clients have, and I quote, "geriatric dachshunds", so Beanie's old ramp will be particularly helpful, haha.

I also went through the horrifying mess that was the cable box and got rid of all of the cables I had a ton of duplicates of and didn't need anymore (mostly things involving USB-A), and we took all of that plus the rest of the e-waste that'd been sitting there gathering dust to the local e-waste recycling place, and finally I did some long overdue vacuuming as well, phew.

beanie our house darkroom tidying and rearranging

Posted on 31 December 2024, 15:48