Coding – The Louie

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 [...]

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, [...]

A friend who works at Dreamhack asked me if I had any 24 led Neopixel-rings in my large store of good-to-have stuff. Unfortunately I didn't, I could only find 12 led ones. In the crew area for the tech/network crew at Dreamhack in Jönköping they have had a display that show the number of active alerts per team. So anyone easily could see if any area had problems, or if everything was green. The display consisted of four 24-led Neopixel rings that either was green for no active alerts, or show [...]

I've been looking for a CMS to create my new website in. I would like something that i could run locally and just "compile" to static html that could be rsynced to a remote server. My main reasoning behind this is that I can't be bothered to have a Wordpress site that needs attention, constant upgrading and poses a security threat in any way. For the last couple of years I've looked at Jekyll and Hyde and all reasonable alternatives available but non of them was to my liking. It they was all full [...]

A couple of years ago I saw that a store sold Kobo eInk readers relativly cheap and a quick google showed that it was possible to root them and do what you wanted, so I bought one, and rooted it. Unfortunately there were no ready made scripts or programs to display weather information on the screen so I made my own. The first version At this time I used Domoticz to control lights and collect sensor data from my house so the solution was to write a python-script that would use the API from yr.no [...]

A small experiment with distorting jpeg-images with Javascript in the browser. You can test it here: https://louie.se/dumpster/misc/jpeg-distort/And find the code here: https://github.com/the-louie/jpeg-distort Mostly simple pixel manipulation, like scrolling and skewing, but also a function to introduce random byte-errors in the compressed jpeg-data itself to get some unpredictable but nice effects. [...]

One day at my work I got tired of having people mailing large attachments back and forth in complex email-chains. Unfortunately much of the information was quite sensitive and shouldn't leave our network or work computers (I know, email *doh*). Using dropbox was out of the question and when I looked for self-hosted alternatives I didn't find anything that was simple enough for me. So I made my own. I started by forking an existing project that handled uploads and built on that. The the result was [...]

After having used the old dashboard a couple of events Telia contacted me if I could create a new one, and that I could. This time I got my friend from previous adventures on this blog, Mr Hannes. His master knowlege about design and UX combined with my backend expertese led us to a novel setup. Test setup at home Insted of only using one screen we wanted to give the dashboard more impact and show more stuff larger. After coming up with a couple of new ideas we finally went with splitting the [...]