Just another tech blag
As I’ve been doing more soldering and creating air quality sensors, I’ve noticed an extreme drop in quality when I’m soldering. This doesn’t surprise me, but seeing the magnitude of it gives me good reason to work on a small soldering fume extractor and filter.
Continue reading “ESPHome Powered Solder Fume Filtration/Extraction”I’ve been a bit annoyed by the default esphome-web names that many of my devices have. I haven’t tried renaming many of them, which seems to be simpler now than when I first renamed a few of them years ago. I also have a secondary issue in my ESPHome dashboard, devices showing as offline, but that are online in Home Assistant.
Continue reading “Renaming Hostnames in ESPHome”
The devil is always in the details with large systems like this. I wanted my multi room audio system to feel like a polished product, a professional setup. For that I need to make sure I covered ALL the details, since it’s all the small things that can add up to big issues. Here is a smattering of the details I’ve been working on for my multi room audio system.
Continue reading “Tertiary Parts of an NFC Music Player”
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”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
I’ve been trying to add some BME680 sensors to my IKEA air quality sensors. My goal was to add a bit more environmental sensors around my house to keep track of temperature, humidity, etc. In doing this I also ran into some odd problems with my D1 minis to work through.
Continue reading “BME680 and ESP”
While working on debugging an ESP32, I needed to get the log for the unit when WiFi was down. To do this I need a serial connection, which can be done using putty. Since this was the first time I used putty to connect to a serial device, I figured I’d give a short how to connect to an ESP32 using it.
Continue reading “Putty Serial Connections to ESP Devices”