Technical blog to share ideas about Home Automation and other things.
After 1 year of playing with the 3D printer Ender 3 Pro I decided to do some upgrades.
Changing the controller to improve accuracy, speed and noise, changing the display to better locally control some options and add the BLTouch, to simplify the leveling.
This article is about changing the controller and the TFT display
After reinstalling my media server I decided to do some spring cleaning.
I did find many movies I did record years ago and created as iso image.
In this way unfortunately is not easy to see them directly on Plex, the best way is to convert them in mp4 (or mkv).
One of the services is my Plex server
Is always better to have a Plan B if the main plan fails.
My server has an embedded KVM (with an extra module installed - see the article Fixing the server - KVM <-> IP) but surprise surprise the actual KVM functionality is not working because the motherboard is not supporting an extension module.
This article discuss about the KVM <-> IP solution with a Raspberry Pi on the open source project PiKVM as a way to have the KVM functionality on my server.
The server has 3 high speed industrial grade fan to keep it cool.
More understanding about how to control them is needed.
At the base of the rebuilding of the services on the server, there is Docker.
Docker allows to run services in a dedicated environment.
Why ? Well, because different applications/programs can require different settings, like maybe the installation of specific languages or specific versions of them.
Instead to clutter the server with 3000 things, a docker image is totally self sufficient.
One of the things I would like to have in the renewed server is the capability to remote access it for monitor or emergency repairs or, like now, for a rebuilding, without the need to be physically present in the "server room" (in my case the garage) to connect a keyboard and monitor to the console.
This article is about the introduction and hardware settings, another one will discuss the installation and use.
Time to install the OS.
with the upgrade I'll bring the RAM up to 32 GB (the maximum RAM this 7 years old mother board can handle) and I'll install 2 4 TB SATA HD in RAID 1 or 2.
Well, it was matter of time.
An hard drive in the server died during the latest thunderstorm.
It is time to do some maintenance to the system, very probably rebuild it from scratch, a good time to reinstall only what is really needed and a full upgrade to the latest version of Linux.
After 7 years of continue service 24/7 I would say it is time 😁
Long long time without writing something, I guess I'm really busy :)
However something happens in my world.
A couple of years ago I did find an interesting Kickstarter project and I decided to participate, Pokit.
It took forever to receive finally the product but in the end, finally arrived !
Few notes about it.
Sometime is not necessary to go sophisticated for some applications but at the same time, "easy is not always easy".
Here an interesting problem.
An old puppet contained a timer to turn on a LED for few minutes.
The goal is to replace the broken circuit.
After building a prototype some more considerations did come up from testing and installation planning.
In this article some notes about to do so from the Arduino environment.
After designing and building the first prototype for the automatic bathroom Fan controller, was time to install it in the bathroom.
Here few notes about what I did.
