Malachi Soord In a beautiful place out in the country

Adding more sensors to an ESP32

I’ve been running an ESP32 NodeMCU in the bedroom for motion, temperature, and humidity for a while and have wanted to extend it’s functionality by adding light sensing too, in order to improve the motion light control to trigger when the lux is a certain level vs the current functional,...

Custom ROMs on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro

I was an avid user of custom ROMs for my Android phones when vendors used to stop providing updates or included too much bloat with their releases. However that stopped when I got a Moto X4 which was for me the right balance and it performed well. Recently I upgraded...

Home Assistant on a Pi4

I noticed that the Pi3 that had been hosting our Home Assistant setup along with a minimal set of addons was really struggling which came apparent with things not being as stable as they should and often requiring reboots. Migrating to a Pi4 based setup seemed an obvious choice giving...

Replacing our NAS

A couple of months ago our old single drive WD My Cloud Home NAS died. The HDD failed and even shucking the device and trying to connect with a SATA adaptor failed to read the drive. Thankfully nothing important was lost as that was all backed up off site. This...

Hass.io on a Raspberry Pi with USB SSD Boot

My Home Assistant setup recently died due to the SDCard finally giving up after 3 years of continual use. Thankfully I had a relatively recent snapshot of my setup so getting up and running again was mostly painless. However this time I invested in an SSD and converting my setup...