Upgrading Marlin firmware on the Ender 3 Pro

Part 4 of my New Years’ 2024 upgrade posts series …

Upgrading my Ender 3 Pro with the newer 32-bit mainboard means I can now more easily upgrade the firmware. I considered trying out Klipper, but since Marlin is what I’m used to (the original 8-bit board was running Creality’s version based on Marlin v1.1.9), I decided to get my feet wet using that first. The firmware on the new board was based on v2.0.8.2 (from August 2022) but the latest release was v2.1.2.1 so I figured that would be a good first upgrade to attempt.

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Upgrading some Ender 3 Pro hardware

For Part 3 of my latest round of upgrades to kick off 2024, I also made some hardware changes to my Ender 3 Pro 3D printer for the first time since getting it back in 2021:

Yeah, just a few things. 🙂 I completed these changes around the same time as the upgrades to my HomeTroller and Debian Bullseye, but wanted to wait a bit before posting so I had more time to play around with the results and I’m pretty pleased!

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Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4

My two Raspberry Pi 4 Bs (in my HomeTroller Pi and OctoPi) were both running Debian 10 (Buster). I like to be current (as evidenced by my bi-annual Ubuntu upgrades) and realized I’d been lax on the RasPis, both of which were two releases behind. Debian 12 (Bookworm) seemed a little too new, so based on some research on the HomeSeer and OctoPrint forums, I decided to just upgrade them both to Debian 11 (Bullseye).

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Upgrading the HomeSeer/HomeTroller hardware

My 1st gen HomeSeer HomeTroller Pi was built on a Raspberry Pi 3 B with 1gb of RAM. While this was fine back when I bought it and was just starting my home security and automation re-design and foray into using HS4, recently I’d been having issues with performance and out-of-memory conditions. In 2021 when I bought the HomeTroller, the HS4 software was only permitted to run 5 plug-ins but that limitation was removed in later releases and I upgraded the microSD card to allow for unlimited plug-ins. Unfortunately, 1gb of RAM is not “unlimited” so now that I’m running more plug-ins (10 at last count) I suspected that the cause of the crashes was due to lack of free RAM. Thus, I decided to try and upgrade the Raspberry Pi in the HomeTroller to a beefier model.

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Changing registrars: goodbye Google (Squarespace), hello, Cloudflare!

Last summer, Google announced that it would be shutting down its Google Domains service and selling it to Squarespace. I had a few domains (like this one) registered through Google that I had transferred from DynDNS (which is now owned by Oracle!) back in 2016 and was just going to let the transfer happen and see how things went. But then the other week I got an e-mail from Squarespace informing me that a dynamic DNS service would not be provided by Squarespace:

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Manipulating the Mantic Minotaur

Overnight temps here in Florida are dipping into the upper 60s which must mean it’s late October and fall is here! 🙂 Let’s check in with my bi-annual sports and Linux updates!

  • After starting out the 2023 season red hot with a 13-game win streak (tying the record in the modern era), the Rays’ October baseball run only lasted until 10/4 when they were swept out of the AL Wild Card in 2 games by the Texas Rangers (who went on to win the ALCS and will be facing the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2023 World Series). The Guardians finished a disappointing 3rd in the AL Central.
  • Just one season after leaving the Browns, Baker Mayfield ended up in Tampa so I’m getting to watch him play again. The Bucs are currently 3-3 and are in 2nd place in the NFC South after the Falcons beat them last Sunday with a game-ending field goal. The Browns continue to be an enigma: they have one of the best defenses in the league and the Deshaun Watson “experiment” seems to be a failure. Despite that, our new third-string-to-starter QB PJ Walker, adding another name to the list of 36 starting Browns QBs since 1999, has the Browns at 4-2 (better than the Bucs!) but 4th place in the ever-tough AFC North. Love the alternate white uniforms though!
  • The NBA season just starts today so the Cavs are tied with everyone else at 0-0. 🙂
  • And finally the Lightning. After losing a bunch of good players in the off-season, it was announced, right before the season started, that goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy had back surgery in September and is expected to miss the first two months of the season! That means I won’t get to see him play when I go the Bolts/Kraken game next week here in Tampa, but maybe he’ll be back when I’m in Seattle for the Kraken/Bolts game in December. Backup goalie Jonas Johansson has taken the team on his shoulders though, and the Lightning sit at 7-3 with 8 points and 4th in the Atlantic division.

Let’s see … what else? Oh, right, a new version of Ubuntu, the Mantic Minotaur (23.10) was released earlier this month. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, the sudo do-release-upgrade -d command took about 20 minutes to download and install the new packages. Notice I had to use the -d parameter this time for some reason, otherwise it said there was no upgrade available.

The only problem I had this cycle was again due to a PHP upgrade. The process removed PHP 8.1 and upgraded to PHP 8.2 but for some inexplicable reason it removed the 8.1 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not install the corresponding 8.2 versions. This broke WordPress, my Piwigo photo gallery, etc. until I manually installed the two missing packages. At least I’m prepared for stuff like this now so it didn’t take long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

Until April then, when Noble Numbat (the next LTS release) comes out …

iPhone 15 Plus

iPhone 15 Plus

I wasn’t really having any problems with my iPhone 12 Pro Max, but when checking the pre-order price for a Apple’s newest phone from AT&T it turned out that I could get an iPhone 15 Plus for just $100 after trading in my current device. I have never really been happy with the camera in my current Pro Max so I decided it wasn’t worth the additional $300 to get a Pro Max this time. It was a last-minute decision on my part but even though it wasn’t until around 11am when I logged in I had no issue placing a pre-order for a black 128gb device. A week later on September 22, my new device arrived.

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Hurricane Idalia recap

Did you know that “I” names for hurricanes are the most-retired storm names? Having lived through Ivan (2004), Irene (2011), Irma (2017), and Ian (2022) and they passed near or through Florida, I can believe it. Now it looks like Idalia could be added to that list.

Hurricane Idalia animated track

Early on, it looked like Idalia was going to come right through the Tampa Bay region. But as the storm progressed it became apparent it was going to make landfall in the northern part of the state. My office was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday so I had plenty of time to prep the house and then just ride out the storm. The wind and rain really didn’t start until around 1:30pm on Tuesday and then continued overnight into Wednesday. Overall the effects were not that bad here (in fact, it rained harder today (Thursday) then it did at any time during the storm). By late Wednesday afternoon it was sunny again (though still breezy) and I was able to get out and clean up the yard (only 3 bags plus a can of debris and two bundles of broken palm branches I had to saw down). I recorded about 3″ of rainfall in the pool and never lost power or internet.

Another bullet dodged.

Three Days at Universal Studios

We had family coming into town for the July 4th holiday weekend and they wanted to take their kids to Universal Studios (primarily for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter). Since we needed to buy tickets for ourselves, we took advantage of a current Florida resident deal and got 2 free days with our 1-day tickets. As a result, we had those two extra days to go by ourselves and since it’d been 5 years since our last visit, we decided to spend Father’s Day weekend scoping out of the parks before our visitors arrived.

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Leaving the (Google) Nest

I bought my first Dropcams back in 2014, right around the time Nest (which had acquired Dropcam) was acquired by Google. Then I added the Nest Thermostat in 2016 (which was later replaced in 2021 with a Z-Wave one during an HVAC system upgrade), the Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors in 2018, and finally a bunch of Nest Outdoor cameras in 2019 for a pretty complete ecosystem all managed very nicely from the Nest website and mobile app. I guess I should be happy I got almost 9 years (has it been that long!?) out of the Dropcams before Google announced they are no longer supporting them and they will cease to function on April 8, 2024.

Google is offering Dropcam customers free Nest Indoor cameras as replacements, which is surprisingly generous, but only up to two (and I still have three perfectly functional Dropcams). I went ahead and ordered the free cameras, but after a few days of using them, I’ve decided it’s time for me to leave the (Google) Nest.

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