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), …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading Marlin firmware on the Ender 3 Pro’ »
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: installed a new mainboard installed the CR Touch automatic bed levelling sensor installed a new metal extruder assembly replaced …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading the HomeSeer/HomeTroller hardware’ »
The calendar shows October which means it’s about that time for my fall sports update and an Ubuntu upgrade! In their first season (after a late start due to the lockout) as the Guardians, my Cleveland baseball team (the youngest in the league) ended up winning 92 games and the Central Division. They then knocked out my …
[ I’ve been slowly (hardly?) working on this post for the past few weeks, but now that we’re stuck at home waiting for Hurricane Ian to arrive I figured I should finally get it done. ] I’m a long-time user of fitness tracker tech: I got my first Fitbit in 2014 (after cancelling my original …
At the end of February my (until now) trusty 2013 Toyota Highlander had a sudden and unexpected engine failure which, no longer having a working car, sent us on a stressful week and a half of decisions, research, and frustrating shopping (it is really not a good time, supply-chain wise, to be buying a new car). …
2021 Home Security/Home Automation Re-Design [ Part 3 of 3 ] A lot of my old Pulse automations were based on my ADT alarm sensors: open the door into the garage, turn on the garage lights; alarm armed in Away mode, randomize the indoor lights to make the house look occupied; burglar alarm goes off, …
Continue reading ‘Putting it all together – Ring, HomeSeer, and Alexa integration’ »
2021 Home Security/Home Automation Re-Design [ Part 2 of 3 ] As I posted a few weeks ago, back in January I decided to cancel my ADT Pulse service and replace it with a Ring Alarm security system. It wasn’t a 100% feature-complete replacement though, I still needed something to handle the home automation side …
2021 Home Security/Home Automation Re-Design [ Part 1 of 3 ] I’ve been an ADT customer for almost 20 years. When we moved to Florida in 2001, our house already had a hard-wired alarm system put in by the previous owners so subscribing to ADT’s monitoring service was one of the first “utilities” we set …