Category: all
Today’s adventure: adding a Zigbee Home Automation dimmer + relay
Zigbee has some dialects. The most interesting one (Zigbee Home Automation, or zha) is standard and used by a lot of products which are (mostly) interoperable. The other (Zigbee Light Link, zll) has some less interop, and is often locked in on purpose. So lets stick with zha. Now, one of the ‘challenges’ with Zigbee…
Discovering what you are using in the cloud
One of the challenges of cloud is similar to BYOD: people sign the company up for, or move services into, the cloud, w/o necessarily the authority or thinking needed. Later, when these services are found to be in use, it might be too late, and you have to accept. E.g. ‘our corp strategy is to…
Today’s adventure: tire repair the way they never taught you in shop!
I have a ~13 year old snowblower. Its been great. Built right here in Kitchener-Waterloo by MTD. The tires, however, have been awful. It takes a 10″ snow-hog. The ones that came with it were on plastic rims and were subject to a safety recal (which I ignored). They leak constantly, and its a real…
Its humidifier season here, and boy did these ones get crusty
So I’ve got the auxiliary humidifier going max, and have installed a ultrasonic one for my office. But the main two furnaces also have ‘power humidifiers’ and those should work, and yet somehow my humidity is dropping. Hmm. What to do? Maybe its time to check these big power humidifers? OK, the 2 main furnaces…
Laugh at my self-inflicted misfortune, hack edition
OK, a couple of years ago I mounted my Nexus 7 tablet in the dash of my truck. It worked great, added a usb-hub, an amplifier, a software-defined-radio, a can-bus receiver for steering wheel controls, a backup camera plus usb composite decoder. All was good. At the time I had this internal mental battle about…
