www.rusinov.ie (Posts about hardware)

Hardware-ish project: Display for Netatmo Weather Station

Vladimir Rusinov — Sun, 21 May 2023 19:30:46 GMT

I've finally published a small project: ESPHome-powered display for the Netatmo weather station.

This is ESPHome-based display for Netatmo weather station. The primary goal is to display indoors CO2 concerntation in my home office so that I know when to open a window. Or when to close and hopefully save some money on heating.

The device itself is not a CO2 monitor and requires Netatmo to be working with HomeAssistant.

graph LR
    subgraph Internet
        NC([netatmo.com])
    end
    subgraph Home
        Netatmo[(Netatmo Weather Station fa:fa-cloud)]
        HomeAssistant[HomeAssistant fa:fa-house]
        Display[CO2 Display fa:fa-display]
    end

    click Netatmo https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/weather/weatherstation
    click NC https://my.netatmo.com/
    click HomeAssistant https://www.home-assistant.io/

    Netatmo-->Internet
    Internet-->HomeAssistant
    HomeAssistant-- Wi-Fi -->Display

Find it here: https://github.com/vrusinov/co2_monitors/tree/main/netatmo_esphome_m5stickc_display

Odyssey X86 Single-Board Computer

Vladimir Rusinov — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 13:49:00 GMT

Shortly after setting-up single-node Kubernetes cluster, single-node Ceph cluster I wanted an actual cluster. I've also noticed that Ceph doesn't actually work all that well: Besides obvious lack of failure tolerance, it didn't seemed to like working on top of just two storage devices of a very different sizes (internal ~300G HDD and 1T USB-HDD). So I've decided to get some more hardware.

I live in a small apartment and I don't really have a lot of space. All I have is a small shelf in storage area. Normal desktops and especially rack servers won't fit. They are also noisy, eat a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. Another thing is that I already had two old SATA HDDs lying idle, which I wanted to use, so the new hardware needed SATA support.

I found the solution in Odyssey X86 board.

Matias Wired Aluminum Tenkeyless Keyboard review

Vladimir Rusinov — Sat, 15 May 2021 17:25:59 GMT

Matias Wired Aluminium Tenkeyless Keyboard review

Short version: good form-factor, poor quality. Returned.

Building a new PC

Vladimir Rusinov — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:00:43 GMT

As Ireland went into second lockdown of 2020, I've decided to upgrade my home personal computer.

I use my PC for gaming, hacking around with Linux and general wasting time in the Internet.

Previously I used PC with Intel i5-3550. After an SSD, GPU and memory upgrades it was still a very capable machine. It is actually still in use today to play some less demanding games co-op with my spouse. However I was not 100% happy with how some CPU-heavy games behaved (city/transport simulators), and compile times were getting annoyingly long while hacking. Another thing I was not happy about is fan management - the old PC had proprietary Lenovo motherboard which would spin case and CPU fans too much.

Desires

Given above I wanted:

Quietness. Ideally I wanted it to be semi-passive so that all fans will stop completely under light load.
Good single-core performance for games which don't do multi-threading too well.
8 or more cores for compiling stuff (also, it's fun to have many bars in htop).