Freedom To Play

Coercing Zigbee, Home Assistant, ZHA, and SmartIR together

Home Assistant is a great piece of software. Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) is a great piece of software. SmartIR is a great piece of software. So why is it so difficult to get them to control a Mitsubish Mini-Split HVAC system? Newish hardware, that's why. Several Zigbee IR blasters have

Reverse Engineering Serial Devices on Windows

It's an all too common phenomena - there's a cool piece of hardware which requires vendor software but that proprietary software only runs on Windows. Currently, this is an issue with Radioddity's GA-510 10W radio. Radioddity updated the device's chipset in mid-2023 without changing the product ID and the new

James Beard Media Award Winners

It does not seem like the James Beard Media Award winners and nominees are in one centralized place, let alone organized by year or category. LLMs have made this type of data collation more palatable so here they are. Table of Contents 1. Cookbook of the Year 2. American Cooking

security

Liberating glucose data from the Freestyle Libre 3

The Abbott Freestyle Libre 3 v3.4.2 iOS and Android apps do not provide a way to export blood glucose data without syncing to a cloud account. Frida is used to hook the Android APK and unwrap the key to decrypt the RealmDB.

Modern Arduino Development

The Arduino ecosystem (devkit+IDE) is a fantastic prototyping platform. However, once projects get more serious the Arduino IDE begins to lose its luster. Where do the source files actually live? Why isn't the IDE auto-completing my custom classes? Where's the linter? Where's the LLM integration? The Arduino 2.x

Statistically Squashing Bugs

An exponential distribution is used to determine how long to test a bug fix before determining with statistical confidence that it has been fixed.

linux

Running Qucs in Debian 11 via podman

Using podman to support Qucs, an application requiring Qt4, within Debian 11.

python

Generating Gmail addresses with steganography

Alternate title: Oh the things you have time for on sabbatical Many, many, forms that accept e-mail addresses do not comply with the RFC 3696 [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3696.txt] specification for e-mail addresses: > Without quotes, local-parts may consist of any combination of alphabetic characters, digits, or any

linux

Solving the Nintendo Switch Ground Loop

Solving ground loop issues when connecting the Nintendo Switch to a computer and analyzing some ground loop isolators along the way

cartoons

Unmasking Scooby-Doo

A list of all of the home media released episodes of Scooby-Doo television series episodes produced by Hanna-Barbera

Sizing Air Purifiers Using CADR

The air purifier marketplace is an apt metaphor for how a particle must feel while being trapped in a filter - at every turn there's a new acronym or regulatory agency or purifier type. It's enough to make someone buy the first air purifier that looks decent and is in

Removing "Subscribe" from Ghost 4.0

Ghost recently released Ghost 4.0 [https://ghost.org/changelog/4/] and with it came a "Subscribe" button and a "Subscribe" footer on every blog post. This does not match the "Just some information on the internet" blogging model of f rdmtoplay.com [https://frdmtoplay.com/]. It is not obvious

Patching in Fahrenheit

An interesting no-brand air quality monitor [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KR631YY?pf_rd_r=2TKXWBYPX66FFAE7DDNG&pf_rd_p=5ae2c7f8-e0c6-4f35-9071-dc3240e894a8&pd_rd_r=39390ae4-22b1-43b8-a859-e14d614f229e&pd_rd_w=qWoNW&pd_rd_wg=lWlf2&linkCode=ll1&tag=frdmtoplay-20&linkId=09da421c82eb44928eb1659c7af8292a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl] showed up in

linux

Self-Hosting Bitwarden without SMTP

Bitwarden [https://bitwarden.com/] provides docker images to self-host an open-source version of the Bitwarden server. After recent updates to the Bitwarden client which broke compatiblity with rubywarden [https://github.com/jcs/rubywarden/issues/122] the official image is a viable option despite requiring mssql. However, to unlock Premium features

linux

Running pi-hole on the BeagleBone Black

The Beagle Bone Black comes loaded with a Swiss Army Knife collection of programs that run on boot. NodeRed, Cloud9, SoftAP, nginx, apache2, the list goes on. This is all fine for fresh-out-of-the-box exploration but gets very tedious when trying to extend the BeagleBone's functionality, say by installing pi-hole [https:

openhtf

Automating hardware testing with a Teensy, Firmata, and OpenHTF

OpenHTF [https://github.com/google/openhtf] ("Open-Source Hardware Testing Framework") is a Python test framework open-sourced by Google at the 2016 Google Test Automation Conference [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_bNn_HTI1Vst6WAB62KHTtgbvxocjpnt2Y-8ugGyP8U/edit#slide=id.p147] with a big bold disclaimer: "This is not an official Google product"

mysql

Recovering MonicaHQ mysql Database

MonicaHQ released 2.17 for self-hosting and it seemed like a fairly straightforward upgrade (docker-compose pull; docker-compose restart) up until logging into the updated instance presented a gut-wrenching: The whole database is gone! As called out in the release notes, the monica mysql database was backed up, but not backed

kicad

Simulating multi-gate devices in KiCAD with ngspice

Introduction With the release of KiCAD 5, KiCAD supports circuit simulation [http://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2018/07/KiCad-5-a-new-generation/] within eeschema using ngspice. 74HC00 The 74HC00 is a quad 2-input NAND gate. KiCAD splits the IC into five discrete components: four individual gates (Units A-D) and one power unit (Unit E)

linux

Self-hosting Bitwarden on a Beagle Bone Black

Password managers are very useful utilities that store (and generate) unique and lengthy passwords. Many utilities exist to store passwords locally (pass [https://www.passwordstore.org/], EncryptionWizard [https://www.spi.dod.mil/ewizard.htm], etc), but I need my passwords synced across several devices. Dozens of password managers exist that

python

Maximizing Bugs Bunny

There are dozens of Looney Tunes DVDs and Blu-Rays for sale. What's the best way to acquire all of the Looney Tunes episodes available today?

linux

Virtualizing Windows 7 (or Linux) on a NVMe drive with VFIO

VFIO (Virtual Function I/O) allows PCI devices to be passed directly from the host operating system to virtualized guests. Normally, PCI passthrough is used to get neat native performance from graphics cards. Passthrough can also be used with NVMe drives, which use a PCI lane, to get near native

linux

Using ddccontrol as a non-root user

Most modern computer monitors support Display Data Channel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel] which allows the screen brightness/contrast/input to be changed without using the on screen display. Many DDC implementations "just work" over HDMI, DisplayPort, or DVI by creating an i2c interface. Some monitors, like

linux

Gigabyte Front Panel Audio with Linux

On some Gigabyte motherboards (including the Gigabyte Gaming 5 [http://amzn.to/2kMJpnh]) there are issues with front panel audio not playing. Speakers plugged directly into the motherboard are detected by Linux and play audio as expected. Front panel speaker connections appear in Volume Managers as expected but no sound

linux

AMD RAID on Ryzen

Warning : This guide is not for the faint of heart. Backup data before proceeding. Here be dragons. This process involves a) compiling a kernel b) compiling a kernel driver c) adding that driver to the kernel d) creating a new LiveUSB installer containing the custom kernel+driver. Here be dragons.

linux

Counting wireless devices on a Raspberry Pi with tcpdump

I was recently a vendor at a large conference and was tasked with keeping track of how many interactions we had at the booth. Rather than use a tedious mechanical clicker to count guests, I set out to create an automated method. Luckily, it was safe to assume most of