Just another tech blag
I have wanted to put a door on my ultimaker for a while now, to help stabilize temperatures inside and keep prints from pulling off the build plate. I feel like it’ll also give the machine a bit more of a professional look which is always fun.
Continue reading “Ultimaker Door”
Just about every time I update my unifi commissioner installation, I run into an error from apt about the updated codename. I should probably remember the flag by now to get past this, but I never do. Hopefully this blog post will jog my memory next time. The error is related to the repository changing it’s codename to update the version number. An example is shown below.
Repository 'x' changed it's 'Codename' value from'x' to 'y'
This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repair can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.
Getting around it is easy enough if you remember the apt flag, –allow-releaseinfo-change, that’s all that’s needed.
apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change
While moving virtual machines from my unraid NAS to my new proxmox node way back when, I ended up needing to use a few of the qemu-img tools. This is a toolset for handling virtual disks used by kvm/qemu.
Something I hadn’t realized while using unraid as my kvm host was that it wasn’t always using qcow2 format, which was my go to format, despite that the webui saying that the file format was qcow2. There were also a few virtual machines I made that ended up in different forms, so to handle these, I ended up having to convert the machines using the following commands.
The first command is to convert from a raw image to a qcow2 file.
qemu-img convert -f raw - O qcow2 /path/to/file.img
The second command is to convert from a qcow to a qcow2 file.
qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 /path/to/img.qcow
The other command I made use of was the info command from the qemu-img tool. This gives out useful file information for the file input to the command.
qemu-img info
These are just some useful, small commands in the qemu toolbox that can help significantly when working with the VM disk files directly.
I have… quite a few blog posts in my backlog, many of them being most of the way done, with others missing information, screenshots I’d like to include etc. These may be short, could probably be expanded upon with more information, but never will be. So in the next few days I’ll be finishing them up to a short quick bite blog post and posting them up (else they’ll never be finished).
The NFC Decks that I design and build have rotary encoders onboard. I added them to eventually use in a whole home audio setup, and now that I have some squeezelite speakers to control, I finally have something to use that part of my design on. Let’s take a look at how to control media volume with the rotary encoders.
Continue reading “Controlling Media Volume with a Rotary Encoder from ESPHome”
I have played with the MAX7219 display a few times in the past but never had a solid project in mind for it. With my whole home audio project though, I realized I can use it for a cool little display showing what’s currently playing on the system. I’ll want a slightly larger display to use for a final project, but for now I can play with the automations and back end setup for such a display.
Continue reading “Displaying Currently Playing Music Info”
I’ve had a Bluetooth speaker in my drawer for a few years that is problematic. It doesn’t charge, or turn on consistently, and has other issues as well. Now that I have the ESP audio kit though, I have a need for a good speaker to plug into it. This speaker needing a new control board is just the right candidate for the procedure.
Continue reading “Cramming Smarts into a Bluetooth Speaker”
Since I found the ESP32 audio kit and it’s support for squeezelite, I decided to try making 2 small 3w speakers with it. One of them I’d use an existing speaker as the base and the second I’d custom build. This is my little custom built squeezelite speaker unit with its two built in 3w speakers.
Continue reading “Custom Squeezelite ESP32-A1S Speaker”
I finally came across a speaker setup that I could try out for relatively inexpensively, that also uses open source software, and can be used for multi-room audio. I found the ESP32 A1S audio kit that is supported by squeezelite-esp and has a simple web installer. On top of that, there are a decent number of forum posts using it and providing details on configuration. This gives me a potential holy grail, open source, locally based, multi-room audio speaker. The main problem I will end up having is putting something together with good audio quality, and appliance level ease of use and stability, but thats a future problem, for now, lets check out squeezelite on the ESP32 A1S.
Continue reading “Squeezebox ESP32 Multi-room Audio System”I hooked up my front door lock to my z-wave network recently and wanted to setup some automations around it. One of the automations was to be a notification from home assistant if the lock was unlocked for more than some time period, with two actions on it, one to immediately lock the door, and the other to do nothing.
Continue reading “Actionable Notifications with Home Assistant”