After moving house, I no longer had my elaborate DIY home-automation setup running. I no longer had my touchscreens in place of lightswitches as detailed here: https://callanbryant.co.uk/post/dshome-2-control-panels/ I wanted to install the touchscreens again, but this time I desired more control over the hardware. Whilst the Fire TV tablets were functional, and the displays were high quality, I didn’t like the fact that they were running the rather locked-down FireOS and contained a volatile lithium-i.

A few years ago I built a massive folded horn subwoofer that now lives in our lounge. It’s approximately the size of a refrigerator, and will happily produce bass that can distort your vision! I’ve now paired it with a DBX Driverack PA2 to do the crossover and DSP, together with 2 Crown XLi 1500 PA amplifiers. One amplifier powers both subwoofer drivers, whilst the other powers my Mission SX2 loudspeakers.

I’ve been using taskwarrior (which I still maintain is excellent) to track what I have to do on a daily basis. It as served me well, working as a mental-offload both at work and at home. I also used it to produce a log of what I’ve been doing at work, which is useful for catchup meetings. However, after some time using it there were a few things that I didn’t like:

For my home-automation project I needed some professional-looking touchscreen panels capable of running the web-based interface that I developed to control my home. Looking around, I concluded that I’d have to make the panels myself given the proprietary nature and expense of existing home automation control panels. The real challenge here is to make the panels look professional. For the first prototype I tried the official Pi industrial LCD with a Pi 2.

I needed a way of measuring the volume of remaining fuel inside a 1200 Ltr fuel tank. The tank is outside, far away from my main home automation controller computer. I wanted an excuse to use the ESP8266, and this simple project seemed like a suitable one. The software options 1. Arduino Bootloader + ESP8266 board file with inotool (+ scheduler) Given my previous software choice, which was a co-operative tte-systems scheduler that I ported from ARM, porting the system to the ESP8266 (RISC) seemed like the natural choice for me.

Just a quick hack! I needed a decent laptop stand. I happened to have a few spare VESA monitor arm mounts. I ordered a breadboard on ebay together with some black M4 countersunk bolts, some washers and Nyloctm nuts. 10 Minutes later, using the VESA mount as a template with a 4mm drill with countersink, I had this: I’m currently using it at work. It fits my MacBook perfectly.

My home network is reasonably fault tolerant; the main router is on UPS, as is my HP MicroServer running ubuntu. I use 2 HomePlugAV 500 network adaptors for a reliable connection (compared to WiFi) between the server and the router as they are on different floors. A few weeks ago a woke up to my external house lights blinking regularly which was confusing. Some lights were on, some were dim, and most were making a sizzling noise.

Moving into a new house, I felt I needed a way to test the RCDs and wiring on ring mains. It was an excellent opportunity to over-engineer something for the sake of it. What I came up with was a device, that: Can trip the power from a phone using a bluetooth (serial) connection Is powered by the mains, and therefore needs/has a UPS Is an awesome prank device So far, other than surprising everyone during an unrelated countdown at a party, I detected faulty earth wiring in my new house with it.

Early 2014, I needed a way of sharing file via a quick URL. Not willing to use dropbox or similar, I created DSDROP. DSDROP uses content addressable storage for de-duplication and instant uploads – if the server has already seen the file there is no need to re-upload it. It supports multiple authentication/authorisation mechanisms, such as LDAP: There’s an NW.JS experimental GUI for people that prefer it. It can be added to a Microsoft Windows Explorer context menu, or a Mac OS X Finder add-on.

Algalon is a nodejs based network monitor/portal. It continuously tests your network infrastructure and computes the overall health metric of the network based on the number of passing tests. ‘Widgets’ are used to visualise various services. They are updated in real time with socket.io. I wrote this in summer 2014, using it as a portal for a network some friends and I maintain. Finally, I’ve gotten around to write about it and release it.

…OK so partially DIY. I got a pre-made PCB from ebay. I used a big die-cast aluminium box. Used a centre punch, scribe and combination square (later realised the box itself was not square). Working! Anyway, it turned out well. Untested in the new form, yet – the bare boards work well though. I used a few bridge rectifiers with a dual-pole transformer, big electrolytic caps with a couple of ceramic filters.

In my previous blog post I wrote about my idea for a google reader replacement suitable for my workflow. It’s written in NodeJS, and can load subscriptions from a google-reader takeoout. This week, I made it! The source is available on github. Why not use an MVC framework? Using the rather useful todoMVC I decided on backboneJS as the framework to use. However, the learning curve was too much to justify using it for the first release.

Google have decided to kill Google Reader. This has annoyed me. There are some open-source and cloud alternatives out there, such as newsblur. The internet is going bananas about what Google have done, it’s just a matter of time before a standard replacement emerges. Some are cloning Google reader’s API. The way I use google reader is simply a filter, to star items from about 128 feeds – the items then end up at http://callanbryant.

Homebrew is the macports alternative package manager for OS X. Learning from other package managers such as macports, apt and pacman, homebrew uses the power of git and ruby to create a really lightweight yet customisable and community oriented system. It is powered completely by git for the packages. This means that anyone can add a package to the main repository via a pull request on github. As a result, maintenance is fast!

There are so many different ways to deploy a node app around the internet. Here’s my way. Use git for version control Install forever – this allows handling of the node process. It’s better than running it in a screen session like most people do! sudo npm install -g forever Allow the git user account (which should be unprivileged) to host on port 80. After following this guide I decided to use setcap:

So I’ve been using vim every day for about 6 months now. You shouldn’t try it, you won’t like it. Just use it for as long as it takes you look down upon other editors. Starting to use vim is easy with vimtutor (which is simply a clever text file that you learn to manipulate with vim) which is great, but I don’t think anywhere really makes the genuinely useful functionality stand out.