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Bouni's blog

random bits and pieces

Create custom icon font from SVGs for use in Home-Assistant

2019-09-20
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 tried to use his generate.py to generate a custom font file from my SVG’s but it failed. After looking into it, I change quite a bit so that the script worked for me (see my fork ).

Reverse engeneering the Hörmann UAP1 protocoll

2018-07-08
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. Costs are about 50€ for the UAP1 and still a couple of potential free contacts are needed to connect the UAP1 to the home automation system. Speak directly to the motor and get the signals directly onto the homeautomation system. Exactly what I want to have :-) I searched the internet for information about the bus, but little to nothing can be found about it. So I decided to reverse engeneer and document the bus!

Make RaspberryPi + Samsung TV a remote display

2017-12-17
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.

Switch from octopress to pelican

2017-08-28
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 :-)

Modbus TCP to Modbus RTU gateway on a BeagleBone Green

2016-12-10
In my last post I’ve explained how I got RS485 working on a BeagleBone Green. Since then I managed to build a Modbus TCP to Modbus RTU gateway based on that and want to show how it works.

RS485 on a BeagleBoneGreen + Waveshare Cape

2016-12-02
I want to build a Modbus TCP to Modbus RTU gateway using a BeagleBoneGreen and a WaveShare RS485 CAN CAPE . Unfortunately the documentation on the Waveshare Cape is really bad, so I will try to document here what steps were necessary to get the things up and running!

Reverse engineering a DQ860MA part 3

2015-03-09
I started playing around with the images i’ve scanned and with a little GIMP magic i was able to create a useful overlay image.

Reverse engineering a DQ860MA part 2

2015-03-07
And here we go with part 2 of my DQ860MA reverse engineering project!

Reverse engineering a DQ860MA Part 1

2015-03-06
As announced in one of my last posts i will try to reverse engineer the DQ860MA. Unfortunately i realized that the PCB is a 4 layer PCB, which makes it way harder to get a schematic. So as a start i will get a list of all components.

Semi-automatic clonezilla boot stick

2015-03-02
I use clonezilla a lot to load images onto computers or create backups of them and it was always a hassle to enter the same values into the diolog over and over again. Unfortunately the documentation is not the very best. Anyway, with a lot of googling and trail and error i finally got a semi automatic configuration. You have to modify 3 files for booting EFI machines as well as BIOS based ones.