Running Home Assistant Open Source home automation locally offers great advantages, such as optimizing your own energy usage or to simply automate boring and repetitive tasks. In case you own a Synology network disks, such as the Synology Diskmanager DS218+ you can directly run Docker containers on your local network disk and therefore also run […]
Observability and monitoring of software service infrastructure is the basis for modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and to successfully run and scale your IT infrastructure. As the digital transformation of business processes and the shift towards highly dynamic cloud infrastructures keeps on accelerating, the dependency on human operation teams poses a critical bottleneck. Especially with […]
In my recent blog on Open Source Home Energy Management with Home Assistant I wrote about how Home Assistant helps you to monitor and optimize your own home energy consumption. Within this blog post I will show how an ESP8266 Wifi enabled Siemens AMIS reader can be used to monitor the energy that your home […]
With the current war in Ukraine, energy prices surge to unbelievable heights. The European countries do rely on Russia’s cheap gas and oil for much too long a time. Even without the Russian war, it was pretty much clear for years that with the looming climate change there is no alternative as to completely switch […]
The widely popular ESP32 microcontroller board is a great choice for any hobbyist to build smart electronics and home automation sensors. The board’s powerful but low-cost design inspired millions of DIY enthusiasts and laid the ground for many great products, such as the Dynatrace DevOps UFO. Firmware software for ESP32 boards is mostly implemented by […]
You know that kind of public wlan hotspots at hotels, coffee shops or other businesses that offer wifi access but you need to accept their terms of service? The technique of offering a consensus Web page right when you initially connect to an open wifi is called a ‘captive portal’. A captive portal forces an […]
Last week I stumbled across a great opportunity that was announced within the Google Cloud Blog, which I am regularly scanning for latest GCP innovations. They offered a 30 days free subscription for their new Google Cloud Skill Boost learning platform, which I immediately accepted. Eager to deepen my existing knowledge on GCP cloud services, […]
Retrofitting existing electrical installations with some degree of additional home automation capabilities is a cumbersome activity. Most of the time, the fixed wired installations do not support adding the necessary home automation wires. Even if there is enough space for your home automation wires, the installation routes often do not end where your home automation […]
Within the last weeks, I thought about building a service for automatically answering incoming user questions by using a repository of previously answered questions. The benefit of such an automatic answering system is obvious, but as a foundation for that implementation, a trained text association model is needed. A large corpus of existing texts therefore […]
There are many reasons why I think that a Synology Diskstation NAS is a perfect all-in-one private cloud platform. It keeps your precious family photos and documents safely stored in a RAID system and it runs your local services as well as your home automation system. Therefore, my Synology NAS evolved into a critical backbone, […]