The Louie

The Louie

The Louie

The Louie

"I create stuff."

After three [1, 2, 3] Ursa inspired keyboards it was time to try to do something different. For a while now I've seen several keyboards inspired by the original C64 design and colours, but I wasn't a Commodore guy, I had an Atari STe when I was a kid. The first ideas and sketches started to form properly around the start of the year, but it would take until the start of the summer before I had something to type on. I started with trying to get the characteristic F-buttons of the Atari ST to work. [...]

To be able to measure the Wifi quality over time I created a small program for ESP32, probably works for ESP8266 also, that every five minutes reports the ping RTT to the local gateway and the RSSI to the connected AP. The idea is to get a handful cheap ESP32 boards and litter them around the house and send the data to influx-db to be able to create a dashboard. And to be clear, this is not a project, just a small experiment to see if it's feasible to use ESP32 to monitor this. You can find the [...]

I have a handful of cheap ESP32 development boards, and some expensive, that all sometimes gives me the error A fatal error occurred: Could not open COM6, the port doesn't exist. But I have found a workaround. The simplest way I found is to start with opening the Serial Monitor (in Arduino IDE) to see the status of the com-port easily. Then unplug the USB cable from the dev-board, hold down the EN / reset switch while plugging it in again. If it worked (which it does 9/10 times) the yellow bar [...]

My home server runs Truenas Core, a natural choice since I've been partial towards BSD since I accidentally overwrote my main disk with OpenBSD back in the 90s. To get some ease of mind I want to back up photos and other important files and CrashPlan is (was when I looked last time) the only cloud backup service that ran on Linux and mounted disks it is what I use. Mouse not working in BHyve I found this guide Setting up TrueNAS with Crashplan Pro Backup that very clearly explains the process of [...]

For quite a while I have been annoyed that I didn't have a phone stand for my phone that would charge it wireless. But then I remembered that I had an old wireless charger that I didn't use any more. The evolution of the stand The first crude version had a design flaw, I had not accounted for the precise positioning needed for the wireless charger in relation to the phone. So I quickly printed a half-moon shaped "bodge-spacer" to test it out. When I had the first version I realized that I wanted [...]

I have a water radiator on my top floor mounted in a small niche, so small that there is only about 1cm of space between the air-valve and the wall. The problem has been that I since I moved here 10 years ago have been looking for something that would fit so I could air out the radiator. But it seems like the closest I found was some image of one. The last couple of weeks we have had quite cold weather and the need for getting the radiators up to max performance was needed more than ever. So after [...]

During this latest DreamHack event here in Jönköping (DHW23) I did some small updates to the Alertsquarer previously featured here. SG had bought some new hardware so instead of three 32x32 panels there was now two 64x32 panels. So while fixing support for this, and doing some minor adjustments I also added support for loading and displaying PNG-images. Like the DreamHack logo in this image. New Alertsquarer with PNG support You can find the code here: https://github.com/dhtech/alertsquarer [...]

A friend at En Produktions Byrå was assigned to design a section of a Fagerhult exhibit for their permanent showroom located at the headquarters. The display consists of several clusters of buttons, resembling vintage radio buttons where only one can be active at a time in each group. A sophisticated display mounted on an adjacent wall is controlled by the buttons. Modern radio buttons After doing some research, we purchased a number of Adafruit buttons with integrated Neopixel (WS281X) lights, [...]

Quite a while ago I bought an IKEA Vindriktning air quality thingie on sale with the intention to connect it to my Home Assistant setup. It’s a quite simple affair, there is a RS232 TX pin on the Vindriktning board that spews out values, so just connect a ESP32 to that and push the values to MQTT. There's quite a lot of guides online that are easy to find, Fabisoft, Oversubstance, Instructables, Turanis, if you want some inspiration. Instead of writing my own software there are plenty open-source [...]

After my second Ursa inspired keyboard was finished and I wasn't completely satisfied with the bulky look I decided to leave fabric and go back to a material I've worked with a bit more, wood. Also my newest PCBs had arrived a while back and I was eager to use them. I've also gotten some LOTR themed keycaps, more specifically the dwarvish set from Drop. So I started on the third iteration of the original design idea form Andreas Chlupka. Main body So I started with getting some oak planks and [...]