I run a BWT AQA Life S decalcification system because where I live we have enormous amounts of calcium in our tap water. In the past I had multiple occasions where the system malfunctioned and spilled water in my basement where it is located. The system is not smart by any means, it just starts to beep when ever attention is needed. Unfortunately this beep is not really audible in the living area of the house. Thats also the case when I need to top up the regenartion salt which is the most common “error”.

We’re in a pandemic for approximately 2 years by now and sinc the beginning my couny administration is publishing a map that shows the Covid-19 cases per municipality on a regular basis. So I creted a Home-Assistant component that downloads that map together with some data from their website and saves the images. I had the plan to create a slideshow video every now an then from these images to show the change in infections.

I work on a small side project where I want to read data from an Phoenix Contact EMpro MA370 Multi-functional energy measuring and a CS Instruments VA525 air flow sensor, both offering a Modbus TCP interface.

I use Wireguard for my VPNs and I’m absolutely statisfied with it. Unfortunately, whenever I restarted my server which runs wiregurad, it didn’t come up automatically.

Once more I switched my static site generator from pelican to hugo! I was not really statisfied by pelican and we use hugo as static site genarator for our hackerspaces website. Through that I learned how cool hugo is and decided to switch. Hopefully that will encourage me to put out more posts that in the recent years 😏

A while ago I built a Modbus RTU to Modbus TCP Gateway based on a Beaglebone Green and a RS485 Cape (check my blog post from back then). It worked, but stoped working from time to time and I decided to fix that issue a few weeks ago. I updated the OS on the Beaglebone and realized that so many things changed since my initial implementation that I didn’t want to invest to much time.

I always wanted to have some custom icons for my Home-Assistant setup. Unfortunately, if you set a SVG directly via URL (/local/myicon.svg) it does not change color depending on its state. On the other hand, if you set an MDI icon, the color changes. So I looked for ways to get color changing icons and came across Thomas Lovén’s hass-fontawesome that does exactly that for the Font-Awesome icons.

I own a Hörmann sectional door to my garage which is driven by a Hörmann SupraMatic E. To control the door via a home automation system you have several options: Connect potential free contacts directly to the motor. That means you have just very basic control over the motor because you can’t give up and down command but just a go command as you can with the radio controls. Usa a UAP1, a small extension box to have better control over the motor and get some feedback signals.

Our fire brigade wants to use a software that gives them details about their fire run. Unfortunately the softare is Windows only and runs on a vserver in the server room. Two displays will be mounted in the hall where the fire trucks are as well as in the locker room so that they can see all the details while preparing. My idea was to use a VNC server on the Windows machine in the server room an a RaspberryPi as VNC client mounted to the backside of each TV.

After a long period of silence I finally found the time to migrate my blog from Octopress to Pelican . I really liked Octopress for a while but I always struggled to modify it in the way I wanted to mainly because it is written in Ruby, which I don’t like much. Pelican on the other side is written in Python which is my favourite language. Anyway, I hope to get a little bit more frequent updates out now :-)