• 1 Post
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle





  • That’s awesome. But the part that your dad was an RF engineer but never took the time to teach you makes me sad. My dad is an elec tech and some of my fondest memories are of him teaching me electronics.

    I guess the take away is if you have kids make sure to take the opportunity to teach them things you’re passionate about! (As long as they show interest of course)



  • Appreciate your take on this and specifically mentioning that you have a VM for Home Assistant. That was a lightbulb moment for me as I like how easy it is to manage updates as an OS install rather than in a Docker container. If I ever get around to rebuilding my server architecture I’m definitely going to do this!


  • Can’t believe I haven’t seen “3D Printer” on here yet!

    A serial hobbyist, with a lot of my interests waning in weeks to months after getting into them. But 3D Printing? I’ve been loving it for 10 years and there’s no signs of that slowing down.

    Sure there’s goofy stuff you can make with it, but 95% of what I print are functional items. So often I need something for around the house and I can just print for cheaper and faster than ordering one online. Examples:

    • vaccum hose adapter
    • desk grommet
    • custom clamp for a bike light
    • small L-brackets for cupboard shelves

    There’s thousands of things out there you can just download and print, or you can get into designing your own. It’s very rewarding to design a physical object and then upload it for others to use too!

    Here’s some examples of some things I’ve designed or remixed from other designs: https://www.printables.com/@Foreverwinter_223629

    The two printers I recommend are the Prusa Mk4 (~$1,000USD) or the Creality Ender-3 V2 ($225USD). The Ender print quality is very good, it just doesn’t come with several of the very nice features the Prusa has - if you can afford it get the Prusa! You won’t regret it.



  • Each device has its own protocol/payload, but there is a utility called rtl_433 that can decode about 200 of them.

    If you’re keen on tinkering a bit I would highly recommend going this route as it’s a lot of fun and opens the doors to do all kinds of stuff.

    Start by getting an SDR. I don’t recommend the super tiny ones since they can get really hot (since it’ll be running 24/7). I have this one and recommend it as it comes with an antenna etc. Nooelec RTL-SDR v5 Bundle

    While you’re waiting for that to arrive set up an MQTT broker if you haven’t got one running already (the Mosquitto add-on in HA) and install the rtl_433 add-on as well.

    From there read the rtl_433 docs to set up a config file to scan for what you want. Out of interest I set mine to rotate through a bunch of common frequencies and let it go for 24h to see what it could pick up. It was quite interesting! Another good way to do this is any wireless device will have an FCC number on it. You can look that up on their website and it’ll tell you what frequency it’s using and you can have your SDR scan that. If you don’t specify any protocols the rtl_433 utility will try everything it knows how to decrypt. This can be CPU intensive especially on a Pi so once you know what protocol it is you can specify it in the config file to reduce CPU load.

    Hopefully that’s enough to set you down the right path. Happy scanning!