Hardware

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. ...

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. ...

H2O N2 - Water Cooling an Odroid N2 In mid-2018, I started to move all of my home server use and compute from an HP microserver G8 over to ARM-based SBC’s. This move was inspired initially as a power-saving exercise to save the idle power draw of the microserver (50-100W). The original setup consisted of an Odroid C1 running standard developer services and the microserver moving to just acting as a backup device that only powered on to handle backing up computers in the house. ...

RUIDENG TC64 The RUIDENG TC64 is a very low cost (<$15) USB-C inline power meter. It’s small with a very nice colour OLED screen. It tries to automatically detect if the USB lines are running in a few modes (QC, DCP etc). This unit is very handy for measuring the power consumption of USB-C devices, and it is moderately accurate (Good enough anyway for the price). It’s over on BangGood over here ...