The PSU that could, the antec basiq power 550. It ran for 11 years, 24/7 in my NAS, and a few years before that in an old desktop. For a $55 PSU on sale from NewEgg, I’d call that pretty good.
Aug 2011 – Nov 2024
Ode to a PSU
Nova launcher app switcher stops working
I’ve run into a problem on my phone where the app switcher stops working. This only seems to happen when using a third party app launcher like Nova launcher on a pixel phone. A solution to it is to go to the pixel launcher in the android app settings and force stop it. Even if the pixel launcher app is disabled, still click the force stop button. This clears up the issue and allows the app switcher to work again.
Bambu Lab X1C Poop Bin
I’ve printed a few multi color prints with my bambu printers and yet I still have no way to collect the filament poops other than grabbing them off the floor. How about I try to fix that.
Continue reading “Bambu Lab X1C Poop Bin”Finding Stuck Automations
I run into a case from time to time when I’m developing new automations where they end up hanging and stop responding. Since most of my automations are set to only allow one to run, this ends up causing future calls to it to fail since the hung iteration is still out there.
Continue reading “Finding Stuck Automations”ESPDeck 3 + LED Backlighting
Ever since I integrated per key LEDs in the NFC Deck, I have wanted to update the ESP Deck design to incorporate them (and update some of my keypads to include them too). I finally got around to both of these, swapping the switches for clear switches on one of my ESP Decks and integrating in the LED lighting.
Continue reading “ESPDeck 3 + LED Backlighting”ESP32 not Accepting OTA Updates
I started running into issues when I began using ESP32s instead of 8266s, I could do the initial flash over serial, and follow it up with some configuration. But the moment I tried to OTA update with further configuration, it would fail every time. The errors were always the same vein, connection reset by the ESP before the update could complete.
Continue reading “ESP32 not Accepting OTA Updates”Custom Printed Keycaps
So far I’ve been using relegendable key caps for my macro pads and ESP Decks, but I’ve recently found another way. There is an open source keycap generator that can create multi color key caps that can be printed on my Bambu printers. There are a lot of pre-generated caps included with the repository, but I’d like to be able to generate my own custom ones too.
Continue reading “Custom Printed Keycaps”Flashing the ESP32 DevKit V1
On occasion, dealing with embedded hardware can be a bit of a pain. Flashing ESPs is a bit of guess and check from time to time. We’ll be flashing an ESP32 DevKit V2 today. We first need to install the drivers from here: CP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers – Silicon Labs (silabs.com)
With those installed, plug the USB connection for the controller into your PC (Close out of CURA too!), and from ESPHome web, connect to the COM port for the device. After that, hold down the boot button while selecting “Prepare for First Boot” in the ESPHome web interface, and keep holding it until you see the install begin running (getting the percentage complete, etc). Once that shows up, you can release the button and wait for it to finish flashing.
Tl-Dr
- Install Driver
- Plug in USB
- Connect to COM Port from ESPHome Web
- Hold Boot button while starting the install
Fixing the WordPress App Connection to my site
It started out with the WordPress app stopping working for me on my phone. This happened a few months back as well and it stayed broken for a few months before it started working again. This time around I was rather very annoyed and wanted to figure out what was going wrong and fix it. In the end it came down to XML-RPC and an “optional” package in the WordPress health check.
Continue reading “Fixing the WordPress App Connection to my site”InkScape Printing
In making the labels for my NFC music tags, I ran into a fun bug when printing from InkScape. Sometimes it doesn’t print your entire image. In my case, it printed all the outline boxes for the labels but NONE of the actual images for the labels. I found out from a forum post that this is a common problem for more complex images.
The way to get around this is to”Save a Copy” of your document as a PDF format, open that PDF in your favorite PDF viewer and print that out. Ensure in the print dialog that the PDF isn’t being scaled as well, as the application might try to be “helpful” in that way (which is entirely unhelpful when you need it to be a specific size). Don’t print the InkScape drawing as a PDF since that runs into the same print bug, it needs to be save as to the format for everything to work.
I use Edge to open and print PDF documents, so I make sure “actual size” is selected rather than “fit to printable area” which will shrink the document that already fits just fine on a sheet of paper.