Has:download on karl

PoE powered Stack Light

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The lights are much brighter than they appear in this picture; had to intentionally darken the image to prevent camera from blowing out the colors.

Stack/signal lights are everywhere in industrial applications for good reason: they’re a compact and relatively information-dense indicator system. They always seemed like the kind of indicator that only people with expensive machines needed. Until I found that they can be had for just under $6/light from Ali Express, that is.

Enhanced Home Assistant Switch Plate (HASP)

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The HASwitchPlate project by aderusha is brilliant. He’s managed to arrange some relatively cheap commodity hardware into a package that conveniently fits into a prime location for interacting with Home Automation - the light switch. The entire package sips power off of the already present mains wiring and connects to any MQTT broker via the esp8266 chip. As the HASP was designed to be used with Home Assistant, the humble 2.4 inch LCD transforms into an accessible control surface for an incredibly powerful home automation platform!

Adding an airborne particulate mater sensor to WS3 Weather Station

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I posted a small bit of code that could decode the data from the ubiquitous WS3 Weather Station and make it accessible to the amazing HomeAssistant via the wonderful ESPHome project. Since then, my weather station has been dutifully collecting data that’s been invaluable for augmenting automation that deals with indoor climate.

As the numerous wild fires in California rage on, the air quality has gone from bad to dangerous. Knowing that outside was warmer, but less humid, was no longer enough to make a smart decision about weather or not to open the windows for some cost-effective cooling. I now need HomeAssistant to be aware of how clean the outside air was before making the decision to pipe in outdoor air.

home lab: simple printable cable org

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Quick / another “i made a thing!” post.

Picture showing designed parts deployed as intended (please ignore the lingering dust! 💨)

I needed some horizontal / vertical cable rings for cat5 and power cables. I would have used the excellent 1U Rackmount Cable Management Rings by boulwarek except the hole spacing didn’t work for my application. I needed cable rings for the ‘front-to-back’ braces which have distinct dimensions:

electronics lab: enhanced psu

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While doing the PoE related testing for this incident, it occurred to me that I never got around to sharing the files for a small modification to the popular RD6006 PSU.

While drafting this post, I discovered that there appears to be a newer version of the RD6006: the 6012. As far as I can tell, they’re in the same ‘family’ and have the same dimensions so the CAD and related model files below should work w/ the RD6012 just as they do w/ the 6006, but i can only ‘guarantee’ that the CAD and related model files below will work with the RD6006.

home lab: mini 'universal' patch panel

Sun, 05 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is another brief “i made a thing!” posts.

Version 2

Update 2020-12-12: I outgrew version 1! I needed a few more ports and didn’t have much time… so I just scaled the part up to double the number of jacks. The links below and the thingiverse and prusaprinters links have been updated w/ the new STL files. Printing and attachment works exactly the same as with the 1x8 version. Rather than include the Fusion360 source, I have included a standard STEP file.

home lab: consolidating multiple PSUs

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I traded writing salt states and managing systemd .service files wrapping podman for the ‘simplicity’ of running kubernetes in my home lab. Jury is still out on weather or not the switch was worth it.

The cluster is a hodgepodge of second hand Intel NUCs and other scavenged compute hardware i’ve collected over the past few years. Some of it runs on 12v, some of it on 19v. For each node, there’s a dedicated switch mode power supply. Each supply takes up an outlet and brings a bit of cable mgmt related clutter. The solution is consolidation.