In this article, we will instill a Raspberry Pi with some magic in order for a TV to talk to a hifi amplifier.
By the end of the journey, we’ll have the Pi pretending to be an AV receiver, intercepting commands from the HDMI
CEC bus, and relaying them to the amp via a combination of serial and IR control outputs.
Any owners of Samsung laundry appliances out there will know they play a distinctive
jingle when finishing a job. I find it incredibly annoying (mostly because it becomes
stuck in my head for at least two days after hearing it), however disabling
the chime causes me to forget to unload my clothes until I run out of boxers.
I’m not a fan of most smart home products, because I distrust the cloud and I like to have
control of my data. The only off-the-shelf “smart” products I have are simple Zigbee (802.15.4)
devices, and a Roomba (because it can be configured for local control, with its cloud
functionality disabled). Thus, when I bought a new washer and dryer a few years ago, I opted
for non-smart variants, thus sacrificing a built-in notification capability.
In this post, I’ll exhibit my stubbornness by explaining how I used Home Assistant,
ESPHome, and some magic to get my dryer to tell me when it’s done without playing that
awful song.
New Mexico is facing a severe fire season, and I wanted to visualize the progression
of the major fires that are currently ongoing. However, I could not find a usable source
of data on daily size and containment statistics.
A repository of daily updates exists, however as articles rather than structured data.
I ended up scraping the website and applying natural language processing to extract
the desired data.
The library and utility is available on my GitHub.
Late last year, I was finally exposed to the comfort of the Ergodox – a staggered-column, split keyboard.
However, having been using 60% keyboards for the previous decade, I felt like it had too many keys. While
some minimalist split ortho options did exist, I found many of them too minimal or too diverged from the Ergodox
design, which I did like in theory.
Like any sane person, I proceeded to learn an entirely new skill in order to fulfill my need for a keyboard
that was kinda like an Ergodox but with fewer keys.
Yesterday, a thread popped up on r/Albuquerque where users attempted to identify
the source of a loud explosion in the early morning. A few individuals provided their locations
and timestamps at which their surveillance cameras detected the sound. I thought I could use
this information to pinpoint its source using multilateration.