Blog – Systems Lab

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024

Upgrading the Network Video Recorder

I’ve been using a small 1U server (Running an E3 V2 CPU) to run Blue Iris for a few years now, and in an attempt to find power savings in my electric bill (and subsequent AC savings too) I decided to do some digging for a replacement. I gathered some metrics on the old server and found it using 80-100 watts, so I was aiming to reduce that by 50%. I ended up finding a cute little 2 bay “NAS” online that supports a low power AMD CPU and can handle the HDD space I need for the video recordings.

March 25, 2024February 18, 2024

Home Assistant Markdown Cards

I have had XKCD comics in my home assistant dashboard for a while now, but never had the alt text or the title in the dashboard. I wasn’t entirely sure how to get those into the UI in a nice clean way (I’m not very good with the templates yet). I finally found the nice clean way to do it that should be pretty flexible to use in the future too, markdown cards.

March 18, 2024February 4, 2024

Playing Music on a Tag Reader

The tag reader, and it’s relative the NFCDeck have piezo buzzers in them. These can be used to play monotone music via PWM signal from an ESP. As an addition to this, there’s a simple music file format from the early years of cellphones that’s also supported by this system. Combine these together and we have an interesting little music box.

March 11, 2024January 27, 2024

ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy and BLE Tracking

I recently started using ESP32s for my projects, mostly out of necessity for the flash sizes and GPIO capabilities, but they do bring in another interesting feature I haven’t made use of yet, Bluetooth capabilities. Each ESP32 can be used by home assistant as a Bluetooth proxy and BLE tracker. It should be a simple addition to the ESPHome yaml too!

March 4, 2024January 27, 2024

Proxmox Backup Server on Unraid

I’ve learned that the proxmox backup server can save a lot of space, and my vm backups are a large amount of storage on both my NAS and in my cloud backups. So I’m going to try setting up Proxmox backup server on docker in unraid to server as my Proxmox backup destination.

February 26, 2024January 27, 2024

Upgrading my NextCloud to use Redis and fix Cron

I’ve had NextCloud installed for a while now and part of my core infrastructure, however it hasn’t been running well. I’ve always had issues getting the cron jobs to run and occasional problems with file locking in it. Recently the file locking problems got worse and I finally decided to fix both issues in one hopefully straightforward action.

February 19, 2024January 27, 2024

Max7219 display in esphome

I saw a really cool blanking panel for a server rack recently that used a bunch of LED displays to show information powered by an ESP and home assistant. I thought the displays were pretty cool and decided to get some and try them out. I may also have some ulterior motives with a project I’ve started working on as well.

February 12, 2024January 27, 2024

Lessons from making 5 side lit signs

I made a single acrylic sign for myself and as a test piece before I started making 5 of them for Christmas presents. Now that I’ve finished those 5, I have a few lessons that I learned along the way that my original sign didn’t shake out of my design and method.

February 5, 2024January 27, 2024

NfcDeck Backlit Key Notification

Since I just finished my new EspDeck model that has backlit keys. I always intended on using these for notifying me of some state in my house so I can take action on it, ideally using the EspDeck itself. This is the first use case I had for the features so I’ll be implementing it so we can start making use of my fancy new NFC Deck to it’s fullest.

January 29, 2024January 29, 2024

EspDeck w NFC: The NFCDeck

The time has come for a new iteration of the EspDeck. This time it’ll include a few new features, and a new form factor. The new version will include all the features of the Tag Reader, original EspDeck, and a rotary encoder.