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Programming / Flashing Sonoff TH16 Wifi Smart switch.

August 28, 2017 / BigJay / 2 Comments

Sonoff is cool little smart switch for not only home automation but for makers and hackers also, why? It’s based on ESP8266 plus it has tx/rx pins accessible and the hardware is well documented (schematics at the end of the post).

Now concerning the Sonoff original software I got it working after around 15 minutes of messing around. For some reason the app also needed my location information, sound recording, access to SD card and so on ….. so yeah not fishy at all. After successful pairing of the switch with app everything worked fine (around 5 minutes) until the app recommended the firmware update….. aaaand its broken. After the update the device was basically just push switch. After the update no matter what I did I could not reconnect the switch to the app.

Luckily I bought it to hack it. So here we go ….

Raspberry Pi VPN server.

August 23, 2017 / BigJay / 2 Comments

Security, security,,,, privacy, privacy, ipv6 leaks, big brother yada yada yada … Lets build VPN.

Raspberry Pi LAMP server v2 with Nginx and MariaDB

August 21, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

So why Nginx and MariaDB ?

Nginx will replace our Apache server. But why ? Short answer is performance. Bit longer answer is that Nginx is Asynchronous server which means it can perform several actions at the same time, without waiting previous to end. Nginx responds faster and consumes less RAM then Apache and this is my main reason for switching to Nginx. There are of course differences. Nginx doesn’t support .htaccess files and sometimes the are differences how Nginx handles PHP.
And MariaDB is drop in replacement to MySQL. MySQL was brought by oracle some time ago and since then the MySQL has problems with including community in development process and distrust from community for having competing products, open source MySQL and proprietary OracleDB. So the original developer of MySQL created a new projects MariaDB and it is fully open source, has strong community and is being actively developed.

Syncthing on Raspberry Pi 2 make your own cloud storage

July 29, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

Syncthing is amazing alternative to things like Dropbox or Google Drive plus you control your data. Now it works little differently than usual cloud storage solutions. Instead of one central server Syncthing uses peer to peer sharing. Also Syncthing is quite flexible for sharing files between your different devices or between people. I will not go into details of Syncthing features and options because probably if you are already here you want to know how to install it so here goes …
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Saleae logic Analyzer With Sigrok Pulseview Install on Linux

July 28, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

Some time ago I bought chinese version of Saleae Logic Analyzer. It’s quite handy 8 CH analyzer for debugging my DIY projects.
Because I mainly use Linux this is small write up (mainly for myself) how to install Sigrok software for Saleae Logic Analyzer.
For now you can still use software provided by Saleae from their homepage (https://www.saleae.com/), but it soon may not work with clones.

Story of Saleae is quite common. Guys developed good product, wrote the software and chinese manufacturers copied it for the 1/10 of the price. Now of course if you like the product and this is a good product, support the developers. But here’s the thing, original product cost 108 USD and for many hobbyists this is not affordable. Especially if you use it maybe once every couple of months.

But I digress …

Running Raspberry Pi 2 from USB drive

July 28, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

Until now I have used Raspberry Pi with micro SD card and while it works for some times I have had lot of corruptions. Not shutting Pi properly down plus unstable power wreak havoc on the SD card. And as you may have read from my previous tutorials I like to run servers on my Raspberry Pi so yeah SQL + logging = high read write are no way to treat small SD cards.

So for loads like that there should be more robust solution.

And for that here is small write up how to use USB thumb drive or USB hard drive as your Raspberry Pi-s root drive. You still need SD card for boot but as you learn from this tutorial it is much easier to replace the static boot drive then whole system, especially if you haven’t backed up your system 10 seconds prior to failure.

Moving MySQL server data to external hard drive.

April 6, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

It’s bad idea to run MySQL server on microSD card because usually this type of application will be heavy on read/write cycles and this will effect the lifespan of the sd card. Plus depending on the type of card you are using the external hard drive will be faster. There are two ways to do it. First move files to external drive and change data dir variable or creating symlink. We will use the latter (How to set up MySQL on Raspberry Pi).
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Sending email with arduino and php.

March 26, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

Most of the currently available solutions for sending a simple email with arduino are bit complicated for my taste. Like knowing your SMTP server ip and the converting your password and username to bas64 like whaaat no way, ain’t nobody got time for that.

So here is a solution, BUT there are couple of small BUT-s you have to have access to some kind of web hosting solution. (There are plenty of free hosting solutions out there, like googling + registration = 3 min. I tested 😉 ). And the hosting solution has to have smtp enabled on php or supported (I didn’t find any that didn’t work). And I will show you how to check that.
We will use: Arduino Uno and WizNet W5100 ethernet shield.

Node Red Dashboard server and temperature monitor.

March 25, 2017 / BigJay / 0 Comments

Here are some screenshots of the upgraded dashboard. And at the bottom is the full Node Red code.

Wifi temperature logger aka “NodeMcu Arduino IDE MQTT DHT11 Node”. Part 3 (Node Red and dashboard)