I recently reported on my first experience with Home Assistant. The reason for this was that I wanted to collect the data from a suitably modified IKEA Vindriktning air quality sensor. The alternative firmware Tasmota, which can be used on ESP8266 or ESP32-based microcontrollers, serves as the basis for expanding the sensor. In addition, I now use the Sensirion SCD30 to measure the CO2 concentration in the room air, the relative humidity and the temperature.
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Tag: Hacks
Home Assistant
Recently I’ve been working on a small craft project: extending an IKEA Vindriktning air quality sensor with a D1 Mini to read the data and forward it to a server via MQTT.
See also Sören Beye’s Github repository for the conversion. However, instead of this firmware, I use Tasmota based on these instructions from Blakadder, which is much more convenient to set up and configure. See also the Tasmotizer on Github.
When I was looking for a suitable server, I quickly ended up at Home Assistant. This is a free software solution for integrating numerous smart home devices and can also be used on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. In my case this is a Raspberry Pi 4.
Update 2022-08-14: In the meantime I have expanded this with another sensor for CO2, relative humidity and temperature, see the article here.
Root access in Android as of 2018
I already wrote about the topic “rooting of Android” in 2013. Since then the direction of Android itself changed a lot.
Things which where not very popular five years ago are now quite normal: films are being watched on mobile devices with services such as Netflix and games like Pokémon GO generate huge sales (by the end of 2017 about 890 million USD). For the providers of such services it is of course important that the data of the apps is not accessible by third parties – for example to protect DRM mechanisms.
Another area are payment services, such as Google Pay, which got introduced in 2015 – and again, it is important that no third party can access confidential data.
CarbonROM on the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact
In September 2017 a security hole concerning Bluetooth was discovered in Android and published under the name “BlueBorne”. Unfortunately Sony decided not to provide any updates for the Xperia Z3 Compact anymore, as the device was already too old after nearly 3 years on the market (also see my other post about this).
Control AV receivers by Pioneer over the network
Pioneer offers a number of AV receivers with network connection which can be controlled using an app for Android or iOS, as for example the VSX-529, VSX-921, VSX-1021. The complete list can be found in the description of the apps for the receivers, like iControlAV2 or iControlAV5.
Raymond Julin found out that the interface used for these apps can be accessed very easily using telnet since the protocol is quite simple.
Fix error “no disk” in Adobe Premiere Elements 13
If you use “Premiere Elements 13” by Adobe, you may know the effect that an error message about a missing disk in drive \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 is displayed (“no disk”) when starting the video editor (shown here is the German message, but the English one is similar):
Customized keyboard layouts in Windows
If you carefully look at the articles on my website you might notice that I use “typographic” quotes, ellipses (…) and dashes (–) as well as the inch sign ″. Generally WordPress (as DokuWiki as well) can generate such characters automatically by doing replacements in the source text according to several rules – however this does not work properly in some cases as shown in the bug #8775 in the WordPress bug tracker. Without additional customizations by a plugin or an additional function in the theme quotes are also only created in the form which is common for English text (“…” instead of „…“ in German). Therefore I prefer to type these characters directly in the text.
Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini – disable start up-sound
When you turn off the device without setting the volume to “silent” it will play a short melody together with the Samsung boot animation when turning it on again (on some other devices this will occur always independent of any volume setting).
If the device is rooted you can just rename the relevant OGG file to disable this.
Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini – disable wake up via home key
Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini provides a mechanical home key. This key also wakes the device up when it is in standby mode, identical to the power key. Sometimes you may not want this feature.
Hacks for the Xperia sola
In this article I describe some improvement opportunities for the Xperia sola.
