Building the atomic clock I’ve always wanted

For years & years, I have wanted to own an actual atomic clock. So I built one.

3D Printing Project: Tiny Trays for Screws, etc.

Part of the Project Logs series. When working on electronics and similar projects, I often end up with a couple piles of small screws or other tiny hardware littering my workspace. I have a few magnetic trays like these, but most of them live in the garage, and they mostly …

Embracing a ruthless approach to email spam

For years, I've dutifully clicked "Unsubscribe" from the email lists of companies I'd done business with, organizations I'd donated to, and news roundups I'd once wanted to read. Over the past two years, however, I have adopted a new strategy …

macOS Scripting: How to tell if the Terminal app has Full Disk Access

My macOS system configuration script requires Full Disk Access, so I wanted to add a warning if the user's terminal app doesn't have the required permissions. This check should be performed right at the beginning of the script, because if the process fails halfway through, the …

Patron-only Fatal Error episodes are becoming public

Now that a few years have passed since concluding the Fatal Error podcast, Soroush and I have decided to begin releasing the patron-only episodes for everybody. These are the even-numbered episodes which previously were released only on Patreon, starting with Episode 12 ("Swift 3 Migration") from January 9, …

Reducing SD Card Wear on a Raspberry Pi or Armbian Device

A guide to reducing SD card wear for a more reliable Raspberry Pi installation.

PiKVM Build

Part of the Project Logs series. For the past few years, every once in a while I'd search something like "IP KVM," look at the prices, and remember why I always quickly abandoned this search. Until sometime earlier this year, that is, when I stumbled across …

Expanding the Ubiquiti Cloud Key Gen 2+ with a 3.5” Hard Drive

Part of the Project Logs series. This post walks through my successful expansion of Ubiquiti’s Cloud Key Gen2+ to use a 3.5” hard drive instead of a 2.5” drive. Motivation In January 2021, I upgraded my Cloud Key to a 5TB hard drive, which is the maximum …

Thermal Camera Photos of Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266 Board

I'm not 100% sure how accurate the displayed temperatures are for the ESP8266 module itself, since using my inexpensive thermal camera I need to set emissivity manually, and the emissivity of the PCB material is substantially different from that of the main chip's metal case. This …

HTTPS Requests with a Small Set of Root Certificates on ESP8266 + Arduino

Part of the Getting Started with ESP8266 + Arduino series. In yesterday's post, I walked through best practices for making secure HTTPS connections using a root certificate store on ESP8266 with Arduino. In that example, I used Mozilla's full list of trusted root certificates for my certificate …

HTTPS Requests with a Root Certificate Store on ESP8266 + Arduino

Part of the Getting Started with ESP8266 + Arduino series. As part of my exploration of the basics of the ESP8266/Arduino/PlatformIO development experience, I wanted to learn how to make HTTPS requests. I figured this would be more challenging than using Golang on a Raspberry Pi, for example, because …

Shipping Data to InfluxDB using Arduino + ESP8266

Part of the Getting Started with ESP8266 + Arduino series. While learning to write applications for the ESP8266/Arduino platform, I wanted to make sure I could post data from the microcontroller to my home InfluxDB instance. The result of this is the influxdb branch of my esp8266-basic-wifi repository on GitHub. …

Initial Impressions of ESP8266 + Arduino

Part of the Getting Started with ESP8266 + Arduino series. I've spent some time over the last few weeks toying with Arduino development on the ESP8266 platform, using PlatformIO and Wemos D1 Mini boards. The result is this GitHub repository with some simple Arduino + ESP8266 demos; and in this …

Environmental Data Logging to InfluxDB using BME280/AM2301 Sensors on Raspberry Pi

Part of the Home Energy and Environment Monitoring series. I've deployed a couple sensors outdoors to log temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure data to InfluxDB. This is partly because I'd like to keep a history of temperature/humitidy/pressure (weather forecasts are easy to find and …

Log your Ecobee data in InfluxDB with ecobee_influx_connector

Part of the Home Energy and Environment Monitoring series. Earlier this year, I wrote ecobee_influx_connector, which logs your home's temperature/humidity readings and HVAC equipment runtime to InfluxDB using the Ecobee API. Thanks to Andy Blyler, there's an easy-to-deploy Docker image available too! The …