Ben V. Brown

I have a doorbell camera in the UniFi Protect ecosystem. I wanted a way to show the doorbell stream on a low cost wall mounted display that integrates will with the existing home automations. I have a pair of these ESP32-S3 based screens, they are very common on aliexpress under the name “ESP32-S3 Development Board LVGL 4.0 inch 480*480 Smart Display”. I paid $40AUD or less for them. They consist of a front touch display connected to an ESP32-S3, with then an extra (optional) board that clips on the back that has a power supply and relay output. For my use case I generally dont use the relay so I can’t talk to how it performs. ...

Often I find myself needing to join/split cables in a situation where its going to be outdoors in full on rainy weather. I have tried using the common cable joiner enclosures like these: But every single time, they all fail due to water ingress, no matter how much the seals are torqued down. It could be my shitty luck for sure, but after this happening enough times I’ve moved to just epoxy encasing joins. ...

I picked up a Mac Pro 2008 2.8GHz model locally, and it worked well when I first powered it up and loaded snow leopard on it. However, I then upgraded the GPU in it (for fun) and the PSU went bang (loudly). As new PSU’s are hard to come by / expensive locally (and I couldn’t find an easy issue to fix upon opening) the Mac has been upgraded to instead recieving a refit of new insides. ...

I still use my Xbox 360 after all these years. Not as often as I once did of course, but at least once a month its up and running to play games. The Xbox 360 controller uses a small battery pack to hold two AA’s or could take a sealed unit with Ni-Mh batteries and be charged with a custom cable. As these are loong out of production by Microsoft, any stock you find is DOA as the cells have died. ...

The KMart Mushroom lamp looks great,and is reasonably priced. However it suffers from the greatest sin of all dimmable lamps; pressing the button goes UP in brightness. This means that whenever you want to turn the unit off, you need to be blinded. This alone is a reason to replace the controller, however giving it smart controls so I can tie it into Home Assistant is an extra win. ...

My process for getting this neat little device running modern Linux. I first discovered the LG:One Quick Share in the discount section of MWave. It was discounted to just $4 and listed its hardware specs with “OS: Linux”. Since I was already placing a large order, I decided to grab one to explore what was inside. When connected to my laptop, the device appears as a USB storage device and exposes a Windows installer for its software. ...

This wasn’t going to become a blog post originally. Gamiee sent me some very nice nixie tubes recently, and as one does, I wanted a desk clock using them. Seeking the warm fuzzy feelings only the orange glow could give. Original Control Board Originally the plan was to use the cheap Aliexpress driver boards, and I picked up this one in a sale for sub $30AUD. These are fairly easy to wire up, however after writing it up it became obvious that this unit had features and settings but I couldn’t track down good documentation on how to enable them. Asking the seller didn’t result in anything either. ...

This is a story of how I did this, this is not a how-to guide you can copy blindly. I was in a situation where a local network was setup to use 192.168.0.0/24 as its local network sub-net. For a few organisational reasons I wanted to move this to 10.10.0.0/16. The extra fun was there were machines in this network that were not trivial to stop. Plan The basic plan is: ...

As is relatively well known, both the Wii and Wii U have extremely limited power output on their USB ports. Nintendo appears to have limited these to exactly the 0.5A of USB 2.0. As the Disk drive in my Wii U has started to become intermittent at reading disks I went through rapidly backing these up to an external hard drive to prevent the device from effectively becoming a brick. However; using any external drives requires either a Y power splitter cable or externally powered drives. While functional it’s certainly ugly. ...

Kubenetes, in the home, for fun The current cluster nodes Pine64 graciously sent me a set of the SoQuartz boards + carrier boards that are being used for this cluster (But I was not paid; they didn’t know what I would use them for). Additionally, some of the time used in first setting up the cluster was done as part of my employment at Propeller Aero. ...