BlocNotes

Small hacky script to set regular temperature changes in 3D printer gcode, to easily use “Temperature towers”.

nfcAudio is an MP3 player, with audio files selected thanks to an NFC tag placed on top of it. I build this two years ago for my kid so he can play by himself his preferred nursery rhymes and songs, it is still used at least once a week :-)

It is powered by an ESP8266 to play audio from a remote server, an I2S DAC driving the speaker and an NFC reader. Thanks to WiFi we can use it to play local files or any webradio stream from the Internet.

For the fifth year of this blog, I switched from Ghost to Hugo. I used to like Ghost as a small and simple tool when I started the blog.

Ghost is now a powerful content management system but far more complex than the simple tool I am looking for, even writing a full post in markdown became less and less easy over the years. As I do not need fancy stuff and like the simplicity to pre-generate the pages and drop the HTML files somewhere I looked at static site generators, I gave a try to Hugo and I liked it. Let’s see what it can do in production but I already enjoy to avoid Ghost, Node, and NPM maintenance :)

I had to move my previous Wireguard VPN + Pi-hole ad blocker to another server, but this time I was not able to expose Pi-hole DNS port (53) to the host machine. It was also better to have Wireguard VPN inside a Docker container… so I did!

As a reminder, Wireguard is a stateless and easy to configure VPN: share a pair of public keys between the client(s) and server then you are good to go! Moreover, stateless is great when used from a phone as there is no power-hungry keep-alive like OpenVPN, nor reconnection time when switching from Wi-FI to 4G.

I recently did a proof of concept on shutters automation by hacking the remote control: the idea is to wire the ESP in parallel with the remote control buttons.
My remotes are Bubendorff 41677 but it should work with a lot of other remote controls.