Happy PI Day!!! A few years back… ok… like 9 years ago. I built an interesting piece of functional art in my living room. It was my media center pc, mounted in a double picture frame on my wall. This thing served me well for a long time. But now it’s time to upgrade it. After all this time the ATOM board in there has...

I have made some progress on the green sprinkler system project. I even shot some video recently!!! Here is some testing of the water quality…. WHO PEED IN MY BARREL!! Now for the big update!!! Built a battery from recycled 18650 laptop cells. Hooked it to my pump. Drained my rain barrel!! Then charged the battery back...

So in the last 2 weeks I have been put to the test of patience and road rage. Last week there was a guy that decided to take his dog for a walk on the over pass and decided to stop and contemplate jumping. This closed down a 3 lane highway and the 2 joining lanes completely in morning rush hour. Diverted traffic was...

So I don’t know why, but I have over the last year or so really gotten into doing things with renewable resources (mainly solar). Well, lets say interested in. I have a couple of solar panels I play with but nothing crazy. So one day I get this crazy idea in my head. I need a rain barrel. But for what!?!?! I had no...

So I have a few things on order coming from china for some various projects. I figured since I haven’t posted much lately I will post some pre-project dribble. Phoenix Connectors – Aliexpress I have these coming to be able to connect audio up to my ClearOne XAP800. The XAP800 is going to be added to my Home Automation...

So, my openhab system periodically decides to leave the building. Appears there is a problem from time to time when the z-wave binding loses communication to the z-wave stick it gets upset and tells openhab to take a hike. This is bad. Once because it exposed something I missed in my fault tolerance. I had compensated...

Since I made the home automation system failover its been great!…. except I kind of would like to know which box its running on it. So I made a quick change. A new Item on my dash board 1String Server "Server [%s]" {exec="<[/bin/cat@@/etc/hostname:60000:]"} I have that in my items file. Then in my sitemap I added...

So, with a friday and a saturday worth of work on my home automation move here is what is complete. install server os on vm install openhab and all bindings currently in use move openhab configs over to new vm shutdown old openhab-pi configure raspberry pi with virtualhere server to share usb configure new vm server to...

I have been running openhab for over a year now on a raspberry pi. I also run mosquitto mqtt broker with a great piece of software called mqttwarn. On my phone I run owntracks. So lets do a brief summary of what these pieces of software do for me and what I currently have configured. **Openhab – “**a vendor and...