I didn’t get much of a chance to work through the home automation tutorial at linux.conf.au 2019 because I ended up helping others in the room get their Orange Pi is booting. Now that things have settled down after the conference, I’ve had a chance to actually do some of the tutorial myself. These are…
Introducing GangScan
As some of you might know, I am a Scout Leader. One of the things I do for Scouts is I assist in a minor role with the running of Canberra Gang Show, a theatre production for young people. One of the things Gang Show cares about is that they need to be able to…
Brilliant Smart Wifi plug with Tasmota
A couple of weeks ago I was playing with Tuya derived smart light globes (Mirabella Genio from K-Mart Australia in my case, but there are a variety of other options as well). Now Bunnings has the Brillant Smart Wifi Plug on special for $20 and I decided to give that a go as well, given…
I, Robot
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…
Mirabella Genio smart lights with Tasmota and Home Assistant
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…
What If?
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…
Abaddon’s Gate
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….
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning
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…
Best Foot Forward
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,…
Support for Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi GPIOs in Home Assistant
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….