Software

The AirThings Wave Plus is a multi-sensor that can show CO2, Volatile Organic Compounds, Radon, Temperature, Humidity, and Pressure. The sensor is meant to be used through a phone app.

However, since it uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a phone app this is not the only way to use this sensor.

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.

If you already use Home Assistant, using the InfluxDB integration, coupled with Grafana will allow you to create very useful data visualizations that offers insight into your home over time. This includes things like: what are the humidity level fluctuations? What is the temperature indoors compared to outdoors? And much more ...

Many weather sensors just report a cumulative rainfall amount to their display unit. That is, when installed the sensor will start with 0 millimeters, and then as rain falls, it will just keep adding to that number, until the sensor loses power, or is reset.

Since it took me a long time to reach a working solution, I am posting this information to save people looking for the same hours and hours of fruitless searching, and frustrating experimentation.

Home Assistant is an open source Python based home automation platform. I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

However, I am running it using a less common installation method, consciously deciding not to run the custom Raspberry Pi image for Home Assistant, nor the docker container version for many reasons.

These reasons include:

Yesterday, I released ETL-Astro, a set of Python programs that generate astronomical catalogs in a variety of formats from license friendly data source, allowing for incorporation in GPL-licensed products.

The programs can do the following:

While experimenting with the pywapi I found a few problems that require an article, in case someone is facing the same issues.

First, for Canadian cities, you need a more current version of pywapi. On Ubuntu 12.04, the python-pywapi is 0.2.2-1 and does not have the API for Weather.com. The version on 14.04 is 0.3.6, and does have that API.

Second, you need to find the code for your city. Here is a list of codes.

Yesterday, I took part in a panel at the local Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on Earning a Living with FLOSS

This is a collection of useful resources for developing for the Android platform for Mobile devices.

The official Google Android Developer's Guide, the SDK, and the obligatory Android Hello World.

The web comic XKCD often has good insight into technology in a humorous and fun way. It often predicts what is going to happen too in the technology, the web, social media and other fields, sometimes unintentionally.

This time, in issue 644 it provides an argument for why open source is better: other people learn from and build upon what is already out there.

Closed source software is not conducive to this by its very nature ...