Posts

Brainslug

Adding remote control to a plain amplifier

Ausdauer: mechanical assembly

And that’s the end of the mechanical assembly. The differential went on fine, and the epoxy is strong enough to hold in the insets. There’s one last thing - I missed the insets on the end of the differential arm, so those are glued and curing

Ausdauer: assembled

I’ve almost completed the right hand side, and the left hand side is far enough along that I can assemble the whole rover!

Ausdauer: left rocker/bogie assembly

Progress update showing the new left hand assembly

VE.Direct

I’ve released vedirect, a tool parses the Victron VE.Direct TEXT protocol and exports the metrics over Prometheus and MQTT. This can be used to monitor your solar installation and view statistics in tools like Grafana or Home Assistant.

nppilot

I realized I haven’t posted about the current generation of nppilot, my never complete, often restarted rover project. The current version is a modified Traxxas E-Revo 1/16: Under the hood this is:

Reducing disk IO

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB3 based SSD to host this website and other services, and as a side effect the lounge looks like a disco due to all the flashing activity LEDs.

Solar at home

For the last month or so I’ve been working on making my home server (which also hosts this blog!) solar powered. It’s pointless but entertaining, and this is a first of a series of posts about what I learned on the way.

Vouch for authentication

I’ve started using Vouch for SSO to my personal site. Quite happy with the experience - it integrates well with Nginx, was straight forward to setup, and is straight forward to enable for different paths on the site.

Propeller adapter

A nice thing about having a 3D printer is quick fixes to small things. The 8x4 propeller that came with my Bixler 3 was loose on the motor shaft, so I 3D printed an adapter: