I like the idea of e-ink. Ultra Low power, easily readable displays. Big fan. I also follow some cryptocurrency’s. So this project is a merge of these 2 things. It’s still a work in progress, as there a few bugs I need to sort out, and I need a nice looking case. But for now it was a fun project that does the thing well and I got to learn some image manipulation in python! Read more

I’ve had a plan of being a good guy and contributing to the litecoin network by being a full node. I was able to do this when I got around to buying a raspberry pi 3B+ and a 2TB external hard drive. There isn’t many up-to-date guides out there on setting a full node up on a raspberry pi, but this one was the most recent, and worked every step of the way (with a few minor changes) - the school of litecoin Read more

Recently I installed pihole on my network because I was sick of ads, and wanted an added layer of security on my network against nasty malware and the like There are plenty of install guides out there for pihole (see official website) so thats not what I am covering today. I installed this on a raspberry pi 1 (Model B) and it handles everything just fine! Becauase I am a fan of home automation, I wanted all the data that is available in the piHole web interface, avaialable to me at my openHAB interface. Read more

Since the ninjablock company has run out of money, and is not supporting the ninjablock anymore, and its cloud service is pretty unreliable (at the best of times) I decided to merge all my homeautomation items with Openhab. At the time I adopted this, it was the only major, multi-vendor supported Home automation “brain” around. Since then home assistant has come around, and alot of others have picked up support for alot more “things”. Read more

So ages ago I found bubbleUPnP (also an andoid app). I’d put this in the category of cheap plex server. I say this because the main reason I wanted to use it was for its on-the-fly transcoding to play media to the chromecast. The android app is also really nice, and you can control your media directly from your device too (Much like what plex does) What I was really impressed with was that the raspberrypi (v1 Model B) handled this without too much hastle, and was able to stream 720p content to the chromecast with no (noticable) worries Read more

I’ve been running my Raspberry Pi (V2) for almost a year and a half on a 16gb SD card, but because I run owncloud on the pi, I’ve been slowly running out of space. I know I can just add a usb drive or have owncloud store the data on an attached NAS or something, but I chose to just store everything on the SD card. Just so everything is in the one place. Read more

So I set this up a while ago, but thought I’d share it here anyway. I was looking to find a self hosted dropbox/google drive alternative. As I am starting down the path of getting things self hosted, so my data is still my data and all that. There were 2 choices with this, that would run on the raspberrypi: Owncloud, or seafile Seafile looked nice, and the core of it is written in C, so to me that would work well on the pi as it would be super lightweight and fast. Read more

So there is an awesome command line tool out there called livestreamer. It’s awesome because you can use it to stream your favourite live things, via command line! No more watching it through a browser and have flash (or even just chrome) clogging up resources. Pretty cool huh? Another cool thing it can do it save directly to file, so if you knew you couldn’t watch it while its live (say your at work) just stream straight to file and watch later Read more

So I was inspired yesterday to create a bash script in which I can control my limitlessLED lights from my raspberry pi (cli). I always have a ssh connection open to my pi while at work, and when I’m at home I always have a terminal windows open, and tinkering around. So I though, why not? It’s still a work in progress at the moment, but basic functionality is there for now :) Read more

So just a quick one today, found an awesome command utility to be able to cast content to a chromecast! It does local content, content from the interwebs and can even stream torrents :O https://github.com/xat/castnow Kudos to old mate xat for this one Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it working from my raspberry pi yet :( Keep getting build errors when trying to install it via npm… I will update once I finally figure it out Read more

My next major purchase was a Ninja Block for the Raspberry pi. I bought this ages ago, but never got around to writing about it! http://shop.ninjablocks.com/pages/picrust I thought this was cool as it was a low cost way to start my home automation projects, and it is definitely marketed at the hobbiest, and I would not recommend this one for commercial use. Check out there NinjaSphere, which is aimed at plug n play users. Read more

I ordered a couple of gadget for my pi a while ago, and they finally came in the mail ( only had to wait 2 months!) Anyways, I ordered a water-proof digital temperature sensor (DS18B20) and a ultrasonic range finder (HC-SR04) to play around with. So firstly I wanted to get the temperature sensor going. I followed the adafruit tutorial, just to hook the temp sensor to the pi (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-11-ds18b20-temperature-sensing/hardware) Once it was physically connected, lets check if it works Read more

A month or so ago, I was trying to figure out how to use eztv’s rss feed to automatically download new torrents to my pi. That’s when I ran across the awesome python program called flexget. (link here)With this you can specify the shows you like, and it will check for new episodes and add them to your torrent client for download. It does a lot more then this,but this is the main way I use it at the moment. Read more

Now we have a webserver, torrent server (which is downloading all your torrents to an attached hard drive), I have set up a file server to serve the torrent folder to my windows computers in the house. This means I can plug my laptop in the TV, browse to the rpi, and play a show :). Here’s how I did so. First you need to make sure you have samba installed Read more

So now all that your web server is up and running, and you have a Dynamic DNS name (if you chose to do that), here’s how I set up the torrent server on the pi (using transmission) credit goes to this website for helpful instructions. I also had a spare 500gb external harddrive (externally powered too) that I am using as storage for the downloads (I only have a 4gb SD for the pi) so instructions for setting this up, credit goes to this webiste Read more

So the first thing I did was use this very helpful guide to help setup my pi as a LAMP server. I didn’t follow the whole thing, just the bits I needed.So following is the basics..firstly install apache sudo apt-get install apache2 and then mysql sudo apt-get install mysql-server And finally PHP sudo apt-get install php5 sudo apt-get install php5-mysql Once this is done go to your pi’s IP address to make sure apache works Read more