My unifi controller was installed on an Ubuntu server back on 16.04 LTS. This server finally reached end of life and I needed to run an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I decided to first try to just release upgrade it two steps. I’d tried this in the past and failed which is why it stayed out of date for so long, but maybe the upgrade process was fixed for things to work automagically. I was a bit wrong on that, however I also found out that rebuilding from scratch is pretty easy.
Continue reading “Upgrading Ubuntu Host for Unifi Controller”Stepping up Telegraf to Influx V2
Telegraf was the second service I stepped up to influxdb v2. With this service running on unraid, I’ll be able to start monitoring the system and get my dashboards back up and running. I have some other instances of telegraf that will need to be stepped up that are configured differently, but in this case, I’ll be working on my unraid instance first.
Continue reading “Stepping up Telegraf to Influx V2”Stepping up Grafana to InfluxDB V2
With my InfluxDB V2 container setup, some tokens created, and buckets in place, its time to start stepping up services. The first service to be stepped up will of course be Grafana itself, so that once the other tools are stepped up, I can start using the dashboards again.
Continue reading “Stepping up Grafana to InfluxDB V2”Home Assistant Notifying of Clothes Washer Completion
My clothes washer makes a little jingle when it completes a cycle, however that noise isn’t exactly loud, and its simply not possible to hear it other than in the room right next to the machine. Because of this I’d like to get a text message notification when the machine finishes.
Goals
- Send a notification to my phone when the washing machine is done
Intro to InfluxDB V2
I have watchtower setup on my Unraid server to handle automatically updating all my docker containers. This is quite convenient, however it does come with some dangers. For instance, my InfluxDB instance recently updated to version 2. This version of influx has a brand new query language, authentication system, and much more. This also breaks all compatibility with my Telegraf, Unifi-Poller, Grafana, and other services. Instead of trying to revert to an older version and refuse the slow change of technology, I decided to just start stepping up services to work with the new version. So I know get to introduce myself to InfluxDB V2 and then to move on to stepping up services to use it.
Continue reading “Intro to InfluxDB V2”Sending Notifications to Phones from Home Assistant
As I build out my smart home systems, I have realized that I wanted to be able to push notifications from it to my phone. I have other services that do this through Email, so I wanted to set up something similar with home assistant. I have a list of a few things I would like notifications of, and getting one or two of them off the list will at least prove out my implementation and give me some more capability from my home assistant setup.
Some things to notify me of
- water leaks
- washing machine done
- chest freezer without power
Setting up Z-Wave in Home Assistant on Proxmox
Recently I have ended up with 2 Z-Wave devices in my home, and while the devices work just fine without it enabled, I wanted to mess around with them in home assistant. I’ve seen lots of information on Z-Wave and Zigbee devices and sensors and had been looking at getting some anyway, so I used this as a reason to jump in.
Since I run Home Assistant on a VM via Proxmox, my setup will end up being a bit different than the usual “just plug in the USB Z-Wave controller and go” for those running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or NUC.
Continue reading “Setting up Z-Wave in Home Assistant on Proxmox”NextCloud “Maintenance” Mode Error Resolution
For a while my NextCloud server decided to stop allowing my phone or desktop to upload to it due to it being in “maintenance mode”, however I could log into the webui with no problems, and nothing in the logs showed it being in maintenance mode. This started to frustrate me as I could find nothing to signify why my clients thought the server couldn’t be used. I tried a number of things:
- Clearing out the file locks table (there were 600,000 entries in it, and I’m the only user on the server)
- occ db:add-missing-columns
- occ db:add-missing-indices
- occ db:add-missing-primary-keys
What finally worked: - occ files:scan –all
Finally with the files:scan –all it started working again and my app was able to start uploading to the server. If you have a NextCloud server and have been running into “maintenance mode” errors when your server is not in maintenance mode, this is certainly worth trying.
Some GitHub Issues worth checking:
Time Lapse 3d print
I wanted to create a time lapse of a 3D print however I wasn’t sure the best way to do this. I’ve made time lapses using octoprint before, but for that to work, octoprint needed to be the machine driving the printer. I tend to prefer running my Ultimaker from the SD card as I’ve forgotten what all my previous octoprint settings were to get it running as smoothly as the Cura settings from the card. I also wanted to work on a more generic way to create a time lapse.
Continue reading “Time Lapse 3d print”BlueIris and the No Signal Camera
I recently setup a few new cameras on my BlueIris box, however one camera in particular was giving me problems. I tried a few different configurations and each time I got a no signal error. I could change the IP to another camera and all was well, but this one in particular was angry at me. I could log into the web interface and view the feeds, so I knew it was working, it just had something up in the configuration. I ended up looking at the Blue Iris status UI to see that I was getting about 1.5FPS through with a slightly lower bitrate than the camera was configured to at the time. I updated the camera config to drop the bitrate and voila, signal, smooth video.
The root cause is something in the cable, either too much interference from AC wiring, or an end isn’t as well crimped as it could be. Either way, I got my camera up in my Blue Iris instance and things worked fine after that.