Semicromulent Rambling

Wio Nodes are tiny wireless controller boards built by Seeed Studio as part of the Grove system which supports  hundreds of hardware widgets and sensors . The nodes were designed to be configured with the Wio app and linked through a Wio server. It's unclear if the Seeed Studio Wio service is just down temporarily or entirely deprecated, but the Wio server  displayed an error while trying to setup some old Wio Nodes  I had sitting in a box. I assumed these nifty little boards were rendered useless by service deprecation, and none of my favorite open source firmwares mentioned support for the "ESP-WROOM-02" chip on the board. It wasn't until a few days ago when I learned that "ESP-WROOM-02" is not the chip but an assembly, which uses the popular ESP8266 chip at its core. Now the question was not if but how can I flash it? Seeed Studio's  Github repo  didn't include flashing instructions but did include the board schematics which held the key to flas

This is my take on a Home Assistant control panel platform. It's based on this guide to creating a Raspberry Pi minimal browser kiosk but with wake-on-motion and some tweaks to improve the experience. Background info, why I chose this over the other options, and plans for future expansion are at the bottom, for anyone interested. My plan is to install one in each room with room-specific widgets. Hardware RaspberryPi 3 B 8GB or larger high quality microSD Official  Rpi 7" touchscreen Official  Rpi camera v2 Smartipi touch2  case with camera mount USB keyboard for initial HA login Assemble the parts according to the included instructions but keep the microSD out for now for imaging. Raspbian lite setup Image Raspbian Lite to the SD using the imaging tool or other method. Create an empty file on the SD boot directory named ssh to enable SSH on boot. Create a file in the SD boot directory named wpa_supplicant.conf with the following content, replacing the variables with your

Objective Automate my existing apartment climate control system by adding a remote web interface to pre-cool my room on my way home during the summer and easy scheduling to warm my room before getting out of bed in the winter. AC interface Most Japanese air conditioner/heater units use IR controls incompatible with Nest  so controlling over IR was the only option. Unfortunately reverse engineering the IR protocol would prove to be challenging. These IR remotes are completely different than those for TVs and other appliances. Most IR remotes send single commands like "on" or "volume up" but these AC units are stateless, it's the remote that has the brains, so each time a button is pressed the remote will send the entire list of settings values.  For instance, if you just press the button to increase temperature+1 say from 24 to 25, the remote will actually send [power:on, mode:heater, temp:25, air-speed:2, air-diffuser:on, timer:off...] I won't go into

On every trip to Hong Kong I try to spare a day to take the ferry to Macau for the main purpose of jumping off the 233m Macau Tower.  This was my 3rd jump so the staff asked if I wanted to try doing it backwards, adding that it's a lot scarier.  After flip-flopping twice I finally committed to doing it. As you can image it's completely different from jumping forward.  Unlike facing forward, the sense of impending death is barely noticeable since you're not staring down at the ground far below.  The first few seconds feels a like the "trust" game where you fall backwards trusting that someone will catch you.  After about 1 meter of freefall your subconscious survival instinct kicks in as it realizes you should have hit the ground by now.  I won't lie, I let out a short scream at that exact moment before my conscious mind returned and realized I was secured to the bungee.  That split second when your subconscious instinct takes full control is the ulti

If you're like me, you may have an image of trains being a legacy of the industrial revolution chugging freight across country but that utilitarian image is naive or at least incomplete.  Modern train and subway technology rivals aeronautics and the history of these marvels of engineering is almost romantic. The Railway Museum (鉄道博物館, Tetsudō Hakubutsukan)  has done an incredible job of showcasing the progress from the first steam locomotives in the late Edo period to the recent E6 shinkansen since it's opening in 2007. The museum is located in Omiya, Saitama the city North of Tokyo about an hour away from central Tokyo. From Omiya station there's a "new shuttle" line which takes you directly to the Museum station. British-built locomotive #1 from 1871. I wonder how hard it must have been to save all these trains from being turned into ships and planes for the war. In front of most exhibits are explanations in Japanese b