J.
In the fall of 2020 I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3 kicking around and no project for it. Can't have that! After doing some searching I came upon something that scratched a number of itches for me: signal snooping, freedom of information, and neat party tricks. I built an ADS-B receiver & feeder to ADS-B Exchange. Honestly it was pretty straightforward: a couple of software-defined radios and tuned antennas from Amazo...
Right before the COVID clampdown during the winter of '19-'20, I picked up a smoking habit. Like many late 30s/early 40s, I started getting the itch to pick up smoking meat as a hobby. My wife and I had gone on a "mini-moon" after our wedding in October '19 (planning on our "real" one the following spring, which... lol), camping for an extended weekend in Point Mugu State Park. We bought a Smokey Joe grill for the occasio...
A project that I had intended to complete before my wedding that for better or worse was delayed until pandemic times. What to do when a cooler has sentimental attachment, still performs its basic function well, but is starting to show its age for the portability bits? Like any sane person, you turn it into a jockeybox! I ordered the conversion kit + parts from KegWorks and held my breath for the drilling. It came...
Can't say it any better than the reddit post I made on the project, so I'll just copy it here for posterity: With the new season started and u/jayblackedout's nhl_goal event working, I pulled the trigger on a project I've wanted to do for a while and add a goal light to my HA setup. The original idea came from this imgur thread, but I swapped out the RPi2 and for an ESP-01S and kept the circuit for ...
A cousin of mine played soccer overseas in the Finnish leagues for a bit of time and fortunately the games at the top 3 levels were all streamed by various services over there. I had his login and one subscription to Surfshark VPN later, I had a way to region shift and follow my relative's athletic escapades as long as the time difference wasn't a bother. It ended up not being the wake-up times that made me itchy, but the scr...
Around the time I did this project, Ring cameras were starting to become A Thing but there were a few things that kept me from getting one: I didn't want to enter the Amazon ecosystem, I didn't want something that would send video to Amazon's cloud, approval was unclear in my condo HOA, and I didn't want an obvious camera hanging on my front door. So I put together this stealthy setup that achieved all of what I wanted but lo...
There was a time, believe it or not, where one would want to know whether or not the Chicago White Sox were currently playing. In the halcyon days of 2019, I sought out to do just that as a sensor that I could trigger off of in Home Assistant. Since HA includes REST API as a sensor platform and MLB includes a pretty darn good free API, it was quick work to get a "Are the White Sox playing?" sensor loaded up: But then, ...
In 2017, Airplay 2 wasn't yet A Thing and multi-send hadn't been added yet to iOS. However, I still wanted to be able to have synced audio nodes around my condo (I was spoiled from my time working in pro audio). I had a spare Android tablet that I installed AllStream onto, an Airport Express from eBay, and Pi Zeroes that I added DACs to output to desktop speakers around our (then) new condo. Et voila! (Excuse the mess, we had...
Back in the winter of 2014-2015, I wanted to build my own Kegbot. I had been watching the project on Github as it progressed and obsessed over the various builds for how I would implement my own. While it would live in the garage, I didn't want to dedicate a full size fridge or chest freezer to the cause as we also used it as a home gym and otherwise hangout space. A chance find of a particular 2-ponies-in-a-mini-fridge build...
Welcome! This is my build blog, where I'll be posting projects either as they're coming along or flashing back to previous ones. Let me know what you think on the various socials.