Philips HUE is a domestic line of Wi-Fi-enabled color changing LED lamps. It was first introduced in October 2012 and has been updated both in 2015 and 2016, so one can say that it is a mature product. Of all the alternatives, and despite its price (15/20 € pro bulb), I think that HUE is the best … Read more…
Years ago I started doing some tests to control a Roomba remotely using an Arduino One with a RN-VX WiFly module. Last month I decided to revitalize the idea but with a new objective: to turn the Roomba into a surveillance robot with the ability to take photos and videos. The first idea was to keep using … Read more…
I use at home a couple of sets of 433MHz remote-controlled power sockets to switch on and off some ambient lights. These lights are managed with a couple of tiny remote controller that used to be lost between the sofa’s cushions almost all the time. I though it will be interesting to remotely control this … Read more…
The last stable version of fail2ban contained in Raspbian stretch is 0.9.6-2. However, newer fail2ban versions include useful functionalities, such as the possibility to use a persistent datastore to save the IPs banned. Raspbian buster is expected to include version 0.10.2-2 but this will not happen until 2019. For this reason, I decided to update the software manually. In this … Read more…
You will probably want to protect certain parts of your domestic web page. This means restricting access only for certain visitors. You can develop the authentication method in the web page. However the server itself can also be used to restrict access. In this tutorial I will show you how to protect with password assets on an … Read more…
As you may have noticed, new versions of most popular browsers notify you whenever you try to access an insecure web page. For instance, Google Chrome from the release 68 onwards marks all HTTP sites as not secure. To force the use of encrypted connections and to avoid receiving these warnings when accessing your domestic web page … Read more…
The Rasperry Pi does not have an on-board battery powered clock. While it is connected to internet, a NTP daemon updates the clock correctly. Otherwise, a fake-hwclock saves the current clock periodically to disk and loads it at startup. So, with high probability, after a power shortage the Raspberry Pi time will be inaccurate. For … Read more…
Since 17th August 2017, the new Raspbian version Stretch, based on Debian 9.1, is ready for download. I usually wait a couple of months before updating to avoid early bird problems. In this tutorial I will explain the most important steps to perform an upgrade from Raspbian Jessie to Stretch version on a Raspberry Pi. … Read more…
WeeWX is a great software for people who have a domestic weather station and are interested in meteorology. This open source program, developed in Python, is able to import weather data from many popular weather stations and to produce plots, reports and HTML pages. Moreover, it uses a easy to extend architecture, making it very … Read more…
Backing up is an absolute crucial task that should be performed daily, especially if you update constantly data or make frequent changes to your Raspberry Pi. Backups should be also performed before making any big change to your system, such as installing an upgrade or starting a new project. In this post a couple of … Read more…