Just another tech blag
I ran into an odd issue while trying to use a template sensor, home assistant gave me an error that I needed to have a unique id in order to use the sensor. Luckily, this is surprisingly simple to add.
It really is just a one line addition to the yaml for the sensor to add a unique ID. You can also use an online generator to create the ID to make sure conflicts are avoided.
- sensor:
unique_id: asdf
name: a_to_b
After the BliKVM PCIE failed to work at all, I decided to try one of the new little IP KVM units out there. I went with the JetKVM because its main distributor isn’t AliExpress (after the BliKVM didn’t work at all), and seemed to be pretty high quality on top of that. I wanted to set it up to have the ability to remote power on my NVR as well as to monitor it.
Continue reading “JetKVM”
I have a number of old projects I started years ago and never got around to finishing. Some of these have electronics in the plans, others are just 3d prints. Many of them I purchased parts for, or printed parts of them, but I just never managed to finish them. So I plan on getting them done, cutting a few corners to do so, but it’s better than not doing them at all.
Continue reading “Finishing Old Projects 1 – Adafruit Gas Mask”
I’ve been watching some YouTube videos featuring 3d printed battle bots recently. One of the form factors that looked neat were the antweight robots (150g), due to their small size and small price for components. I decided to design and build something similar (though no weapon) just to drive around for fun, tormenting the pets, and practicing some design work. I figure I’ll design it so a tail can be tied on with feathers for the cat to chase (the dog will chase it just because it makes noise).
Continue reading “RC Mini Bot”
I saw this model while looking for some type of laser toy for a cat. It looked neat, integrated with home assistant, and it didn’t require many parts, so I figured why not try and see if my cat would be interested with it.
Continue reading “Catomater”
My NAS has been getting old, and it’s been getting more and more noticeable over time. Considering that I built it in 2013, I’d say it’s had a good 10+ year lifespan and could use a solid upgrade. I plan on reusing a fair bit of hardware, but I also plan on moving to ZFS for my primary storage, so I’ll be getting new drives to use in a new ZFS backed array.
Continue reading “NAS V2.0”After I built out my two speakers running squeezelite on esp controllers, I ran into some issues when streaming music to them. Sometimes they would stutter, skip, or have other audio playback issues. I knew these weren’t problems with my media files, so it had to be my setup for the speakers.
Continue reading “Additional Squeezelite Stream Stability”While working on setting up my new hardware and bringing my unraid pool back online on it, I encountered an odd problem that made me sweat. I started my array and immediately it gave an error that the cache drive failed. This was odd since that drive was fine just before I started installing the new hardware, so what changed now. I stopped the array and looked, and it was no longer assigned as the cache drive. When I went and added it to the cache again, unraid claimed it was a “new drive” and would be wiped when the array was started.
This was very wrong, this wasn’t a new cache drive, it was the same one as before. It also has a large amount of data on it that I’d like to keep, and docker settings. So I had to figure out how to tell unraid that the drive was fine and to just use it.
I found out that this was one of the situations the “new config” option was added to the tools for. So I went to tools -> new config and applied it while saving the disk locations in the pool. I double checked them after applying the new config, went to the main page, and checked the box stating that the parity should be assumed correct. After starting the array, everything was in order again. All my containers started, data was all there, and everything was back working again.
I decided to reorganize my home assistant dashboards which culminated in adding a new dashboard and moving a number of views from other dashboards to it. What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t as easy as going into the UI and hitting copy on the view, though it wasn’t hard to do in the end (basically one more step and then hitting copy).
Continue reading “Moving a View between two Home Assistant Dashboards”
I upgraded my webserver to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS recently and ran into an odd little issue. Apache2 refused to start up due to a PHP plugin failing to load. This was specifically PHP 8.1 failing to load as it was replaced in the repos with 8.3. This ended up having a quick fix to get things in order.
All I needed to do was disable the old PHP mod and enable the new one. I used this reference for which versions would be supported in 24.04 to enable the correct version. Overall a nice quick fix and my webserver was back operational
> sudo a2dismod php8.1
> sudo systemctl restart apache2
> sudo a2enmod php8.3
> sudo systemctl restart apache2