It is been more than 7 years since my last post. Shame on me.
This roughly corresponds to the time I met my partner, bought a new house and moved from my small apartment, kicked of the family life, became a father to a beautiful daughter and things here on panic1.be moved to the back burner. The website was kept running and up to date, but real life took priority over hobby projects and posting my progress here.
In those years we’ve all gone through the COVID-period, lost loved ones to the pandemic, suffered the lock-downs, got infected anyway despite them. The world to me looks a whole lot different now.
I have been feeling the itch to get into it again, and do some programming (and non-programming) things I really like to do but don’t get the professional opportunities for. I’m not sure how fast updates will come in, it will all depend on how much energy is left at the end of the day.
Some new, and some recycled, topics and projects coming up:
- Kubernetes
- Micro-controller Clock Radio
- Mechanical keyboard
- Bonsai
- Picking up the guitar again
- Picking up on the quadcopter project again
- An energy meter using current clamps
- A water well depth meter using a submersible pressure meter
Kubernetes
The project I’ve been working on the most in the last year is setting up a Kubernetes cluster HomeLab. I have talked before about OpenStack and I will revisit OpenStack again in the future, but the last time I deployed OpenStack I did it all manually. By the time I finished the setup, the projects were already outdated and should have been updated. This manual process was not something I was looking forward to repeating again. I came across Kolla-Ansible as a way to automate the OpenStack deployment, and I decided to learn more about Ansible.
I used Ansible to automate my dotFiles setup, and some automation in the HomeLab, but as a challenge I chose to start and setup a Kubernetes cluster using Ansible, as a stepping stone to work my way up to OpenStack. I was familiar with Docker and thought that Kubernetes would be a continuation on what I already knew, and that it would be easy.
Boy was I wrong.
Clock Radio
My girlfriend complained her Clock Radio LED display it too bright and I promised to build her a new one with an e-Paper display.
I will talk about my hardware choices, the plans I have on the software and share my progress on the development.
Mechanical keyboard
I picked up a new hobby to keep me busy the COVID, and I will talk about a few of the keyboard I have bought and the custom builds I have assembled.
Bonsai
Another lock-down hobby I started, limited to the size of my small garden I bought a few bonsai trees. Recently I have joined my local club and subscribed to the starter course, so I will document my progress on the trees here as well.
Guitar
My guitars have been in their cases since the move, but I would like to get back into shape and start practicing again. Progress will be slow, but it will take my mind of of the computers and allow a different creative outlet.
Quadcopter
Regulations have changed in the years since I started working on this drone. The nearly 1kg it weighs now will put it in a category which required me to get a drone pilot license.
I will need to evaluate whether it is possible to rebuild the drone into an allowed category (primarily whether I can reduce the weight to 250 grams or less), or whether I would need to take the lessons and exams to become licensed.
Energy meter
This was meant for a Zephyr RTOS project at work, to demo some Real-Time Operating Systems and compare different projects and features. Focus at work shifted from RTOS to cybersecurity, and the project became dormant. The hardware has been laying on the project workbench for a long while already, I might as well finish it. We will need some electronics to convert a current into a measurable analog voltage, and pushing data wireless onto MQTT for easy readout in Home Assistant using an ESP32 or an Arduino-like micro-controller board I have laying around.
Water well depth meter
We have experiences a few droughts during the last years (not this year though), and we had the risk of running our rain water collection well empty during the summer. In order to have some indication on the level of water in that well, I started to design a water well depth meter. This project will need some electronics design, will use ESP HOME as a software platform and focuses on ultra-low power consumption.