Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
Not the book of the movie, but the collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. I’ve read this book several times before and enjoyed it, although this time I found it to be more dated than I remembered, both in its characterisations of technology as well as it’s handling of gender. Still enjoyable, but not…
One of the things I like about Home Assistant is that it allows you to take hardware from a bunch of various vendors and stitch it together into a single consistent interface. So for example I now have five home automation vendor apps on my phone, but don’t use any of them because Home Assistant…
More correctly titled “you die horribly and it probably involves plasma”, this light hearted and fun read explores serious answers to silly scientific questions. The footnotes are definitely the best bit. A really enjoyable read. Title: What If? Author: Randall Munroe Genre: Humor Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Release Date: September 2, 2014 Pages: 320 The…
This is the third book in the Leviathan Wakes series by James SA Corey. Just as good as the first two, this is a story about how much a daughter loves her father, perhaps beyond reason, moral choices, and politics — just as much as it is the continuation of the story arc around the alien visitor….
We’ve owned this book for a while, but ironically Catherine lost it for a bit. It seems very topical at the moment because of the Marie Kondo craze, but its been floating around our house for probably a year. The book is written by an 80+ year old and explains the Swedish tradition of sorting…
Catherine and I have been huge fans of Adam Hills for ages, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that I’d like a book by him. As an aside, we’ve never seen him live — we had tickets for his show in Canberra in 2013, but some of us ended up in labor in hospital instead,…
So, I’ve been off in the GPIO library salt mines for a while, but am now ready to circle back and document how to get GPIO inputs and outputs working in Home Assistant. This now works on both Raspberry Pi and OrangePi, assuming that my patch gets merged. First off, let’s talk about GPIO outputs….
As part of working through adding OrangePi support to Home Assistant, Alastair and I decided to change to a different GPIO library for OrangePi to avoid the requirement for Home Assistant to have access to /dev/mem. I just realised that I hadn’t posted updated examples of how to do GPIO output with the new library….
Now that I have GPIO outputs working nicely for Home Assistant using either a Raspberry Pi or an Orange Pi, I want to get GPIO inputs working as well. Naively, that’s pretty easy to do in python on the Raspberry Pi: import RPi.GPIO as GPIO import time GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM) GPIO.setwarnings(False) GPIO.setup(17, GPIO.IN, pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_DOWN) while True: print('Reading…')…
A quick list of things I did for the LCA2019 Home Automation tutorial. Of course Alistair did a lot more, but I still want to track these. Add OrangePi GPIO support to Home Assistant (declined) Document OrangePi GPIO support in Home Assistant (declined) Add OrangePi Prime GPIO pinouts to OPi.GPIO (merged, and released) Expose pullup…