Lenovo thinks firmware updates are not for Linux users

My old ThinkPad T420s was really showing it’s age, being fitted with a 3rd gen Intel core i3 and only 8GB of RAM it started failing on building NixOS updates, or ESP firmware build would just freeze.

Sadly, my financials don’t allow me too flat-out replace my ThinkPad with a newer ThinkPad since prices have of-course increased a lot in the last 10 years so I had to cut corners somewhere.

Imagine my surprise when I found the Lenovo allows you to buy their IdeaPad line without a pre-installed operation system. That saves me €100 for keeping the dumpster fire that is Microsoft Windows 11 off my new hardware! WIN-WIN!

But then, it turns out, Lenovo forgot other operating systems exist at best, or is actively hostile towards anything not Microsoft at worst.

Surface mount spacers

Well well well… The Sonoff TX switches where doing what they should do but another issue cropped up.
As i said in my last post my old light switches are of the surface mount kind. The wall socket or whatever it’s called was not the right size for the new screwholes.

The problem

It almost fit right but clearly there was a gap and the wiring was trying to push the switch away from the wall.

Adding Sonoff TX/T1 EU Wallswitches to ESPHome

For a while now if been annoyed with the old 1970’s surface mounted wall switches in my home. I mean they work but stylistically I didn’t like them much and I really wanted something more flush with the wall. After looking at some options I decided to go for the Sonoff TX series switches. They contain an ESP8266 which I am now a little more familiar with and should be easy to add to my growing Home Assistant setup and I really like the glass front. So I ordered a couple.

Sensors, Sensors everywhere

It’s been a while since the last update, so I really need to get this update out there before I fall into the trap of not maintaining this website for 2 years again.
Luckily I have not been sitting idle the last months and have been making good progress on my Home Assistant installation (after needing to restart 5 times due to corrupt SD cards, dammit).
Nonetheless, I now have 3 ESPEasy powered sensor boxes.

Always on IRC [Updated]

After visiting 5 times earlier and thinking This place is so cool, look at all these nerds! I became a participant @revspace in The Hague last January. They have a IRC channel on Freenode #revspace and though to myself, wow… IRC, I haven’t used that since playing counter-strike 1.4 with my friends and being on Quakenet with mIRC and NoNameScript. Oh no brain, you lie, I also used it again briefly when I was following the DailyTechNewsShow podcast live with HexChat.
But after getting used to cloud based IM solutions with scrollback abilities and the always online nature of things today I just couldn’t shake the feeling I was missing out when HexChat was closed.

Snippet: OpenTherm Gateway for Home Assistant

Adding the OpenTherm Gateway to Home Assistant

These are the steps I took to add my own opentherm gateway to home assistant. May this example help you add yours.

Assumptions: You have a working home assistant installation, you have a working MQTT broker on the same machine or enabled the embedded MQTT broker (which is what i’m using) and you have connected the OTGW via serial or FTDI usb.
Firstly follow the installation instructions available on py-otgw-mqtt’s github page.

HomeHub: moving to Home Assistant

Bye HomeHub

We left the HomeHub story running heimcontrol.js with home made plug-ins for the opentherm gateway and RFXcom. I say running but it was crashing all the time. Months passed without running anything, I couldn’t be bothered resetting the node.js application every time it decided to quit on me. Frustrated and disappointed the whole thing was pushed on the I’ll get to it when I feel like it track. In this case it took about a year to do anything else.

Modifying frostmourne

Light it up

Since getting my epic weapons replica Frostmourne, a sword from a small indie video game called World of Warcraft, I’ve been slightly annoyed by how little the Ice Shard base lights up. I decided then, some better lighting would spice things up a bit. A trip to IKEA and some double sided tape later, Frostmourne was illuminated by dioder RGB leds. Until the power supply failed…

Going from control to ctrl

No better moment to seriously up the lighting game for this piece of video-game replica history then from a broken state. With the power supply gone, Frostmourne stood in darkness, asleep, waiting, until the time came to rise to power again. The RGB used to be controller by the dioder remote (if you can call it that, it’s wired) but that just won’t do anymore… Arduino powers activate!

My 3D Printer setup

TL;DR

Since last time I updated this blog (ie: a long time ago) I’ve bought and returned a Monoprice Maker Select Mini 3D printer, got a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus, build an enclosure with IKEA furniture and started printing all sorts of stuff!

Interested?

False start

I’m not going to dwell on it too long, because the printer is already gone, but the Monoprice Maker Select Mini came recommended for starters. I was impressed by the print quality as it was better than I had expected, but when printing large objects things went badly. Turns out the buildplate was warped, but because the printer was not available here I bought this printer on amazon.com I had to ship it back to the USA, ouch! Later I learned that one week after I bought mine on amazon a local retailer started selling the bloody things!

HomeHub: History part 2

Continuing with pi’s

So, I was waiting on the arrival of two Raspberry Pi’s. One for XBMC and one for my Home Automation efforts. By now there was a better guide for installing Domotiga on Raspberry so I used that to get started on the new system. It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped for with Gambas not wanting to play ball on the ‘make install’ stage. After a week of tinkering I got Gambas to build and installed Domotiga again. Then I found out Domotiga wasn’t entirely made with server/client operation in mind so it took me a while to get it to run as a daemon and getting another install’s GUI to connect. Still, I got it running. This time with a fix for the initialization issue. Hooray?!

HomeHub: History part 1

The beginning

Ever since moving into my first very own home I’ve been wanting to start working with home automation. I didn’t want to buy a off-the-shelf system (where’s the fun in that?) and googled around a bit for possible setups. The first piece of software I came across was Domotiga, which seemed to support most of the things I wanted to achieve. However Domotiga is written in a programming language I had never heard of before (gambas) so changing things to suit my needs was going to be a challenge. No matter, it had everything I wanted so I dusted of my old and broken (the screens gone) notebook and installed everything. My first impression was good, the software had a nice GUI and all the options where there. Onward with the building of things!