HA - HomeSeer - Introduction

After long time I decided to start to work again on some Home Automation projects.
Mainly because a specific need, but I'm starting to see possible side projects along the way.

I already have some "pieces" of HA around, my glorious and ancient X10 system, an integration with Amazon Echo for the archaic X10, but it was time to start to play with ZigBee or Z-Wave.

So I had to choose and pick up an hub for them.

Fitbit Wellness Report

One of the reason to pay for Fitbit Premium was the possibility to generate a 30 days Wellness Report.

I did use that every time before to go to a doctor, it is a nice way to report some physical data.
Since last year, Fitbit (or better Google who did buy Fitbit) decided to remove the possibility to have the Wellness Report.

Why ? Who knows.

EcoFlow Delta-2 MAX - reading device via API

The EcoFlow Delta-2 MAX has an Android application that can monitor and handle the generator.

It can show the battery charge and the instant load/discharge, enable/disable outputs, etc.

Hover one thing is missing : create and show a graph reporting the loading/discharge of the battery, to see for example how much the solar panel contribute to the charge and similar info.

3D Printing - Octoprint renewal - part 1

Basically since the beginning I did use Octoprint to control my glorious Ender 3.

OctoPrint has to run somewhere, so I did use a Raspberry Pi 3B to run it but all things age and I did reach the moment to update it.

Eton American Red Cross SOLARLINK Portable Radio ARC FR600

On an antique mall I did find this nice radio, little bit dirty but otherwise in good shape.

Some cleaning notes.

Emergency power system - logistic

Sometime the power can goes off in the area.

I decided to buy an EF ECOFLOW Solar Generator DELTA 2 Max 2048Wh with 400 W solar panel to charge the Solar generator for long outages.

DreamQuest Pro+ N150 - a review

Once in  while the main PC I use need to be upgraded or fixed.

Normally I'm going on eBay looking for old server to rebuild the main PC, this time I decided to try to buy a new computer, where "new" means recently built.

Browsing around I found this little guy and somehow I was intrigued.

Cooling the server area - Peltier way - the idea

Time ago I did buy a Peltier unit cooling contraption.

There are many different types on the market, I think mine is a 50W unit already assembled with 3 fans, two for cooling down the
hot" side, and one to push the cold air.

Phoronix Test Suite

Sometime there is the need to determine if a computer is "fast" and thus capable to run specific operations.

Is not easy to set up, run and interpret results of tests.
There are many way to do tests on machines, this one is open source, covers Linux, MacOs and Windows, is based on PHP so is highly portable and is quite complex to master just because is HUGE !

Server Chronicles - Install Joomla on Docker - APKH

I used Joomla for many websites, this is a procedure to install Joomla on a Docker container rather than the traditional set up on a server.

The advantage is the capability to install different versions of Joomla for tests/development or data retrieval from older backups.