Controlling Philips HUE Lights with Raspberry PI

Control Philips Hue Lights

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…

Roomberry Surveillance Robot: Roomba + Raspberry Pi Zero W + Camera

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…

Controlling 433 MHz Remote Switches with Raspberry Pi

433Mhz module

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…

Updating Fail2ban and adding new rules

fail2ban logo

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…

Configuring SSL Certificates with Certbot

Certbot logo

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…

Keeping your Raspberry Pi on time with a RTC module

RTC DS3231

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…

Update Raspbian from Jessie to Stretch

Stretch Toy Story

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…

Installing WeeWX in Raspberry Pi

WMR88_MeteoStation

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…