Hack Correlation

Scope This is mostly a rough guide on sizing a PV system without breaking the bank. There are many variables and vendors, component pricing varies around the world, geographical position matters as well, electricity pricing makes a huge difference. The prices are quoted for 2024/2025, currency is avoided as EUR, USD and GBP are roughly the same, local taxes might have a bigger impact than exchange rate. The goal is to have the best price-to-performance ratio as possible without the need to go off-grid. It also means that small outages (<24h) can be mitigated. I am presenting the calculations for my needs but you can scale up for your home. Preparation First you need to determine your house base load. This means the hourly average for 24h, in my case this is around 130W/h, so fridge, servers, cameras, central heating, around 3-5kWh per day when nobody is home. A laundry load takes about 2kWh, one dishwasher cycle 2kWh, heat-pump dryer again around 2kWh. Basic cooking with electricity...

 I wish it wouldn't have come to this, I'm all about free knowledge but the spammers are really pushing their luck. Long story short, here's a list of companies that you shouldn't deal with, as they are most likely scammy or working with spammers. Please find another company instead of the ones below: Laptop Service Mumbai https://www.laptopsservice.center/dell-laptop-service-center-kalyan-mumbai.html Spammer:  https://lenovolaptopservicecentres2023.blogspot.com/ Spammer:  https://bamboomatchawhisk.com/ Spammer:  https://teacoffeevendingmachines.net/   https://www.teacoffeevendingmachine.in/ Spammer:  https://togearmarketing.com/ Spammer:  https://vishalmotors.co.in/ Rationale These spammers have been pouring a torrent of spam on my blog. There are at least two sides of the story. Google has refused to intervene to repeated spammers so I have to turn this around. If your company name is on the list Stop hiring these people and your name might be cleare...

Back in January I bought a cheap 55" TV, mainly to use as a low-latency monitor. On a random note, I haven't watched TV in years, all my TVs have been used as monitors in the past 10+ years. The model is  UHD SMART TV S55U5515MQ  and uses a dual-core running at 1.2GHz with 1.5GB RAM. It's running a version of Android TV 6.0. I think a very similar set is with a model name of Genesis, distributed by the same company - Jay-Tech. Was not expecting much for the price but it does a decent job as a monitor, with relatively low latency and relatively good resolution support. However the software on it is quite bad, even wrote the company to ask some questions but never heard back from them: there is no color calibration, even though it has a green tint from the factory there are YouTube notifications of new videos when the TV connects to a network, even with no account set up could not find a way to save the program list on USB as listed in the manual there's a Home and a Sta...

My first "computer, while growing up, was a Russian clone of a ZX Spectrum. I got it as a "hand-me-down", along with a few tapes and a short booklet in cyrillic. Back then I had no clue of English and even less of other languages, so I just dumbly typed the programs in. I guess that first computer was responsible for me learning to program, since the games would not load from any of the tapes I had. This happened again with my second gifted computer, a Sinclair QL, for which I had no games. Anyway, more than 30 years later I thought of trying to see what was actually on those ZX tapes: There are 35 games listed, though I managed to load probably less than 10 in that computer's lifetime. Step 1 - buy a cassette deck and restore it But we're not here about that project. Instead, you should make sure that you have a decent and well-adjusted tape player. If it's a brand name and mains-powered, it should probably work. Portable players in my experience have a low...

About a year ago I bought a new automatic coffee machine to replace the aging Saeco. This is a Philips machine, 3200 series, which actually is a pretty close match to the Saeco. Not a surprise, since Philips is the parent company of Saeco, while Saeco is the parent company of Gaggia. Which means some parts could be interchangeable. I waited for about one year to see if any problems develop with the machine, but so far it has been pretty reliable. This post will aim to compare the old and the new machine and figure out how to automate it. Just click on the Saeco label or search this blog to see the old teardown, which thousands of people have already read. There will be plenty of pictures after the subjective review. Disclaimer : I don't work for Philips or any other coffee company, this is just a hobby.  Software and usability The new machine is much better in terms of software and friendliness. While the old one used to dump ground coffee whenever it felt something wrong, the new...

I was nicely asked if I could take a look at a disabled toaster unit that stopped doing its job. Post-cleanup it looks like this: The quick repair job turned out to be quite entertaining in figuring out post-mortem how the unit failed and the questionable design decisions. It involves no complicated electronics and it might help other people figure out what to look for before buying an appliance. With another layer of failures stacked on top, this unit could have set the house on fire or shocked someone. Fortunately no damages were recorded, but the deep-dive might prove interesting to some people.

My apartment has the shutters/blinds controlled via a trio of wall-mounted button panels. Here's my experience of integrating them into Home Assistant for automation and remote control. Steps: Identify the control units Buy the remote unit or reverse engineer the control signals Build a firmware for NodeMCU (ESP8266) based on ESPHome Result I've kept the intrusion to a minimum so they can be reverted without any traces: Home-Assistant panel with the three blinds actions: Control Unit The button panels have Elero stamped on them so the first thing was to go to the manufacturer's website and search for a product:  https://www.elero.de/de/produkte/jalousiesteuerungen/ The closest match seemed to be Elero VarioTec, not sure at this point if it supports remote control or not (spoiler: it doesn't).

This is an interesting piece of tech that gets a fair amount of usage. I think some everyday industrial objects hide a complex mechanical layer and present it as simplicity. To understand this piece, think of the single-use paper towel dispensers inside public toilets. This has been raised this to the next level, providing a continuous textile towel - which possibly gets afterwards washed and repaired - guessing around 50 meters in length. You pull the towel piece facing you, from the top, it allows about 30cm to be drawn out, after ~10 seconds it draws the slack (30 cm) back into the unit. This has to be experienced in order to understand the mechanical clockwork hiding inside. There are no electronics involved here. Fortunately, there was a broken unit waiting for repair, complete with refill instructions. The upper roller supplies the towels. The lower roller is the take-up roller. The green cylinder, spring-loaded, flattens up the take-up so that it's as tig...

I recently got access to a broken Siemens Dressman TJ10500. It's a pro-sumer device that helps you straighten shirts without the tedious ironing. It looks like this: The unit was described as "not heating" or "cooling rapidly". The front panel and every other feature seemed to be functioning just fine. I will describe how to tear down the unit, what can go wrong, what I did to repair mine and how well it works. Teardown To get inside the unit, there are many screws that need to be undone: around 5 at the back of the unit (except the air filter ones), two below (left side with the unit facing you). Then you need to carefully lift up the plastic trim that surrounds the LCD and controls, all around, you will have two more screws just next to the airbag. Most of the screws are Torx T20, some of them are Phillips (PH2 I think). With those undone, you can remove the left [metal sheet] panel, that gets you access to everything inside the unit. The m...

I wanted to refresh the battery in my travel laptop and decided that 70€+ might be a bit too much. So I've settled onto a 20€ battery, +1€ shipping, from Amazon. Here's the affiliate link:  http://amzn.to/2AUSIUW - but read before you decide to buy it. If you are ordering from outside Germany, returns will be difficult, as LiPo batteries fall under a special shipping clause. Second, the battery is suited for an X220 model, not X230. Third - and most importantly - the battery is a fake, with less than the advertised capacity. If you still decide to continue, then read on. Some nice people have managed to decrypt the EC firmware inside the Lenovo laptops and allow for a way to rewrite it: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec You can go through all the trouble of compiling it, but, to save you 5 minutes, here's the ready-built image that I've used myself, for X230  and the file for X230T , tested by readers: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgd6o6gn3xkvl2e/patch...

I use a glue gun from time to time and was getting annoyed with the cable, finding a free power socket, was always in the way, ... So I bought a cheap battery-powered glue gun . It takes 7mm sticks instead of my old one - which takes 11mm ones. It also takes a little less space and has a better stand. The old one is rated at 15W while the yellow toy has 8W written on its label. No surprise in finding a standard 18650 cell in there. The glue stick feeds through a rubber o-ring. The only electronic intelligence can be found in the board at the bottom of the unit. The bottom of the board features a standard (90 degree) micro-USB socket and three LEDs. The LED diffuser is pictured bottom-left, while the hand-soldered "ON" switch is center. The bottom of the board has a TP4056 battery charger IC . It can supply up to 1A of charging current (and it does) and is produced by the NanJing Top Power Corp. While it looks like the same part number and provides sim...

This is not a "howto" as I couldn't get it to work. But if you want to know why, read on. I've been using MatterControl instead of MakerBot for my CTC Bizer (Dual) for a while know and have been really satisfied with it. However, the best results (and control) I got with a direct USB connection. Having a 2m-long USB cable dangling is not my style so I've searched for a solution. TCP-Serial bridge There are several options here, but I've settled on ESP8266 (NodeMCU) and one of these projects: https://github.com/jeelabs/esp-link https://github.com/beckdac/ESP8266-transparent-bridge https://github.com/luc-github/ESP3D So basically the ESP8266 acts as a server which then forwards everything to and from the hardware serial connection. The first two projects work (probably) fine, but MatterControl has currently (Nov 2017) an issue with virtual serial ports. I've tried both com0com and VSPE. It runs fine for a few commands (2-5) and then it fai...

I recently bought a Floureon thermostat for my electrical floor heating . and. took it apart. for your appreciation. Later edit: a lot of the users are complaining about the clock advancing a few minutes per day. You need to decide if you can live with that or ask the seller to provide details. I couldn't test this, as my unit runs from an intermittent supply. Edit 2: see a hand-drawn schematic at the end to help you with wiring. The thermostat can switch both heating and cooling loads, but the product page does not list any instructions. Fortunately, I have a cell photo of those: Outside In the box, the thermostat comes with the leaflet above, the unit, two drywall(?) screws and an external sensor. The pinout is listed on the back and this is where you should pay attention:

This is just a quick post while I'm working on something bigger. I've tried to get a NodeMCU module to interface to the serial port on my CTC Dual/Bizer printer, which uses a Rev G(?) Mightboard motherboard. Unfortunately, the main serial port is not exposed, just UART1. The easiest way I've found to get to the TX/RX lines was to piggyback on the resistors just before the ATMega8U chip: The 8U is used as a serial to USB converter. 5V and ground can be picked up from the exposed UART header, pictured bottom middle: I tried to use the ESP3D firmware but it only works with boards that support G-Code, not X3G. So I abandoned the project due to lack of time. The pictures above are from a few weeks ago but just yesterday I managed to put a hole in my 8U chip, no idea how that happened: So now I was forced to use my makeshift serial connection. I tried both possible solutions: https://github.com/beckdac/ESP8266-transparent-bridge https://github.com/jee...