Hardware-ish project: Display for Netatmo Weather Station

I've finally published a small project: ESPHome-powered display for the Netatmo weather station.

Netatmo CO2 monitor

This is ESPHome-based display for Netatmo weather station. The primary goal is to display indoors CO2 concerntation in my home office so that I know when to open a window. Or when to close and hopefully save some money on heating.

The device itself is not a CO2 monitor and requires Netatmo to be working with HomeAssistant.

graph LR
    subgraph Internet
        NC([netatmo.com])
    end
    subgraph Home
        Netatmo[(Netatmo Weather Station fa:fa-cloud)]
        HomeAssistant[HomeAssistant fa:fa-house]
        Display[CO2 Display fa:fa-display]
    end

    click Netatmo https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/weather/weatherstation
    click NC https://my.netatmo.com/
    click HomeAssistant https://www.home-assistant.io/

    Netatmo-->Internet
    Internet-->HomeAssistant
    HomeAssistant-- Wi-Fi -->Display

Find it here: https://github.com/vrusinov/co2_monitors/tree/main/netatmo_esphome_m5stickc_display

How learning is different from fixing

I've started a page where I intend to collect links to various materials that I liked.

Today's addition is John Allspaw's talk Incident Analysis: How Learning is Different Than Fixing. The talk is only about 20 minutes long (the rest are questions and I didn't find that part particularly interesting). In the talk John describes common pitfalls of incident analysis.

A few points that resonated with me:

  • Severity of the incident has nothing to do with how difficult and interesting it was
  • Good postmortems are stories - they use typical story-telling techniques and are interesting to read
  • Often postmortems become box-ticking exercises. Many postmortems are written to be filed, not read. This happens even in pioneering SRE orgs like Google.

Spend 20 minutes of your time, it may be worth it.

Windfarm walk

There is an interesting walk on the border between Wicklow and Wexford in Ireland. The walk is unusual as it in the windfarm. I didn't have an opportunity to walk under the wind turbine before. It's an interesting experience and it was worth a drive from Dublin.

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Running OpenVPN in Kubernetes

(updated )

I condemn Russian invasion to Ukraine. I hope the war ends soon. I wish Ukrainians can take their country back and start rebuilding. I wish there was no more suffering.

There is another, less bloody but still important war happening right now. The informational war between Putin and regular residents of Russia. It's been going on for a really long time but escalated dramatically in the last few weeks. Thousands of people were arrested for participating in anti-war protests. Many, if not all independent news sources were blocked so that Putin can continue spreading lies through the government-controlled channels without facing any criticism. And the sad part is that Putin appears to be winning this war. Many Russians are now brainwashed. I've been watching for years how many of my acquaintances become angrier and more and more radicalized. Thanfully my close friends (those few who are still in Russia) were spared and still have their critical thinking intact. But for how long?

So I've decided to help them and set up a VPN service which will help them to get access to free information.

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House renovation: Jan 2022

(updated )

First order of business after purchasing our fixer-upper was finding an architect.

The house has too many small rooms on ground floor. Kitchen is in a small, very poorly built extension and it's clear it'll have to be demolished - it had holes you can see through to the outside. First floor was better, although too very dated.

So it was clear there is some work for architect. Besides, we weren't really sure where to start and several people told us architects can act as a guide / overall project manager.

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House renovation: December 2021

Starting today, we are the owners of a "fixer-upper" house in nice area of South Dublin.

The plan is to renovate it to our liking and turn it into our "forever home". There's a lot of work but we are excited.

Currently we live in an apartment, not too far from Dublin city center. It's a small two-bedroom place. We like it, however it's just too small.

Why a fixer-upper?

  1. Competition for houses in good condition was just too high. There's a lot of people who (like me) sold their RSUs at crazy COVID prices, and (like us) didn't fancy being stuck in apartments during COVID.

  2. We could not find a house in good condition that we really liked. There was always something wrong - layout, not insulated enough, extension roof right in front of bedroom window, no driveway, etc. So we'd end up re-doing a lot even in a house in good condition.

So here we are.

House

Odyssey X86 Single-Board Computer

Shortly after setting-up single-node Kubernetes cluster, single-node Ceph cluster I wanted an actual cluster. I've also noticed that Ceph doesn't actually work all that well: Besides obvious lack of failure tolerance, it didn't seemed to like working on top of just two storage devices of a very different sizes (internal ~300G HDD and 1T USB-HDD). So I've decided to get some more hardware.

I live in a small apartment and I don't really have a lot of space. All I have is a small shelf in storage area. Normal desktops and especially rack servers won't fit. They are also noisy, eat a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. Another thing is that I already had two old SATA HDDs lying idle, which I wanted to use, so the new hardware needed SATA support.

I found the solution in Odyssey X86 board.

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