Posted in 2017

Don’t underestimate the… Doorbell

A while ago I needed a doorbell, so I hacked one together using a Raspberry Pi I had laying around. It was a temporary fix while I got around to building an Arduino based replacement. A month or so ago the SD card croaked, so it was time.

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Hacking your Conference badge for Hugs & Profit

Last week was Linux Conf AU 2017, which is a community run Free and Open Source Software conference that is in a different A/NZ city every year. This year I’d managed to attend the Open Hardware MiniConf and was inspired to build something during the conference. I’m not sure how it occurred to me to build a ‘Hug Detector’ into my Conference badge, but it did and after talking about it with some fellow delegates, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

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Automating your home with ‘themachine’

There will be more posts to come, but for some time I have been playing around with home automation. One of the things I really wanted to do was utilise some form of machine learning to make decisions about when I wanted the Shed’s Airconditioning or the wall fan turned on. I could have utilised rules in my OpenHAB based home automation system, however I’d already gotten reasonably creative with those and wanted a challenge.

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Overhauling techman83.me

When I first started this blog blog in early 2014, I had grand intentions of keeping it up to date. I got a great start forking it from Paul Fenwick’s website which actually provided a solid foundation to build this one.

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