We recently got balanced ventilation installed, and I have interfaced it with Home Assistant. However — the ventilation unit have three “special modes” that can not be enabled through the Modbus interface; fireplace, kitchen, and override. These can only be set on the touch panel, mobile app, or through inputs terminals on the controller.

So I repurposed an old project and made a three-relay Wi-Fi controlled module, using MQTT to send commands and receive statuses.

Then used Home Assistant to automate it 🙂

Using a few cheap sensors, a wireless keypad, Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant; I was able to get a basic security alarm up and running during a free afternoon 🙂

We recently got balanced ventilation installed, and discovered that our ventilation unit has Modbus TCP/IP support. I even found a thread on the Home Assistant community talking about interfacing the C6 controller, which our unit has, into Home Assistant 😃

Here is my implementation 👇

Our house was first built as a log cabin in 1890, then extended in the 1950s, and again extended and completely renovated in 2000. It’s well insulated, and has no drafts — it seems to be relatively airtight.

Great for keeping the heat in, not so great for the air quality. Add the fact that we didn’t have a single fresh air vent, only those tiny trickle vents above the windows. What you are left with is a house with bad air quality.

So we installed a balanced ventilation system 🙂

The first network run I did in this house — was to the hallway access point. It ran along the basement stairwell ceiling, through the basement, and into the home office.

Since I’m already running hidden network cables in the same area, I figured why not hide this one as well 🙂

Invisible cables are the best kind of cables!

I’m hosting this blog on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. One disadvantage with S3 is that it doesn’t have a simple way of creating redirects — like Netlify, Firebase, or even Nginx.

But there is way; using the AWS CLI, put-object, and the x-amz-website-redirect-location metadata.

Here’s how 👇

We have a Raspberry Pi driven digital calendar in the kitchen. I’m currently using crontab to turn the HDMI port off at night, and when we’re at work.

But a much more flexible solution is to control it using MQTT and Home Assistant. That way it can easily be automated to turn on when we’re home, if there is movement in the kitchen, or any number of conditions.

It’s really quite easy to do, here’s how 👇

Ever since we bought the house, last year, I’ve been planning to run wired network to the living room TV and media center — it’s time to finally get that done 🙂

We recently got a family computer in our play room, and it of course needs network. So I ran a 20 mm conduit from the basement, through the kitchen, to the play room, and pulled two CAT6 cables.

Shortly after I upgraded my Unifi access points from 4.3.28 to 5.43.43; I started getting timeout issues. Not all devices, but some; the Raspberry Pi driving our DAKboard, and both our Netatmo air quality sensors.

It took me a while to understand what was happening, and I didn’t immediately relate it to the firmware upgrade.

When I got serious about my electronics lab — I found it useful to see what equipment other people have in their labs. I got a lot of information from EEVblog’s video on How To Set Up An Electronics Lab.

So — here is my contribution 🙂 Below you’ll find a list and photo gallery of my electronics lab equipment 👇

Earlier this year I put up a Raspberry Pi powered DAKboard display. It shows photos from our Google Photos albums, the time and weather, and most importantly; our shared calendar.

But I’d like it to show some custom data as well — like indoor temperature and humidity. And the measured outdoor temperature, not just the one reported from the weather service.

Here is how I did that — using Home Assistant 👇

I recently watched Jeff Gerling’s video on CO₂ levels, and how to monitor it. My home office is also in the basement, with no windows. So I paid attention to the air quality when setting up down here.

In addition to monitoring the CO₂ level, I’m also automatically ventilating the space when the air quality gets too bad.

Ever since I ran a underground CAT6 to my garage — my Unifi UAP-AC-M access point have been acting strange…

I initially noticed that whenever I was close to the garage; I would loose internet connectivity for a few seconds. At first I just thought it was an area with poor coverage, but looking at the signal strengths that didn’t make any sense.

I’ve written a few posts now in the Home network v2 series. What’s the plan? Let’s go through that now.

On Tuesday August 24th I posted a link to my Running underground CAT6 to detached garage post on the r/homelab subreddit. The Reddit post got lots of upvotes and comments — and started climbing on the r/homelab front page.

This generated a spike of traffic like I have never gotten before. In this post I’m going through some numbers; like performance, traffic and cost.

I’m adding security headers to my S3 and CloudFront hosted website — using Lambda@Edge. It’s pretty easy, here is how 👇

I dug a 10 meter trench to get wired network to my detached garage. Then installed a rack cabinet and PoE switch. Here is the build log 👇

This blog is built with Hugo — an open-source static site generator. Static websites require no server side processing, which makes them easier to host and opens up new hosting possibilities.

There are many options out there, but I deploy my website to AWS S3, using CloudFront to distribute it globally (aka. make it fast).

Here is the why and the how.

I walked around my house, and garden — measuring the Wi-Fi signal. Here are the results 👇