Another (tech) blog

Disclaimer If you have no experience working with electronics, consult a professional. Besides the health risks and hazards, there is also the risk of damaging your heating system. Depending on your location, you may not be allowed to perform these tasks without voiding your insurance coverage. Background, Requirements, Setup In my home, there is an older (20-year-old) central heating unit with a single room thermostat that controls the boiler. The thermostat can easily be programmed with a schedule and target temperatures. Like most of these thermostats, it is battery-powered and controls a small relay that sends a signal to the boiler. ...

What is Klipper? And why would you move away from Marlin? Klipper is a 3d-Printer firmware. It combines the power of a general purpose computer with one or more micro-controllers. While I did not have any issues with Marlin, in fact I think it is a very well maintained and stable firmware for most printers, I liked the approach Klipper takes. Marlin is the whole firmware, you don’t need anything else to run your printer. Your Printer Mainboard holds the firmware and does the heavy lifting. Usually these mainboards are powered by a microcontroller, often a simple 8-bit MCU like an Arduino Mega. These boards have limited RAM and limited flash size, so especially on older boards, you can not activate all features of Marlin, as they simply do not fit the flash. Usually that’s not a problem. ...

Gitlab Setup I assume you’re already running gitlab somehow somewhere. If you’re using Gitlab as SaaS, your Atlantis Endpoint must be reachable from the internet. Please bear in mind, that the status GUI of atlantis does not provide authentication, if you don’t protect that route, you might expose sensitive information about your repos to the world. (That was the case while writing the article, might have changed now.) Create Access-Token Using a Service-Account / Bot In your project settings or group settings of your gitlab repo, you need to create a new Access Token. You might need admin access to do this. Remember the name of the token, you will need it in a minute. Save the Token in your password manager, we will need it to configure atlantis. ...

Motivation I recently got my first iPhone after years of Android. And the first error message I received after moving my data from my old phone to the new phone was: Your iPhone can not be backed up. Huh? Why? Ah! Not enough iCloud Storage! But I’m doing all my backups myself and store them locally. With Android and e.g. LineageOS and SeedVault a setup I was used to. Now it was the challenge to find a solution for iOS. And here we are… How can I create a backup of my iPhone, WIRELESS and without further interaction? And how to monitor it? ...

Warning Consider this Post outdated the second I released it. The single source of truth for your should be and is https://valetudo.cloud/pages/installation/dreame.html#fastboot and all credits must go to the valetudo team. I’m only writing this post as a reminder of the steps I took. Important Resources Starting with information gathering is obviously the first step. So here’s a list of useful pages I found to solve the quest of removing the cloud connection. ...

Replace your Chitu Firmware with Marlin on your Tronxy 3D Printer After a couple of years with my improved and tuned Anet A6 it was time for a bigger machine, and I decided to buy a Tronxy X5SA-2E, as I wanted a dual extruder setup. The assembly was straight-forward but the printing… I was used to Marlin and the Chitu Firmware is just a pain with their proprietary limitations and weird custom GCodes. So the obvious step was to replace the firmware with Marlin. Before I bought the printer I read up about the improvements the community was doing on bringing Marlin on Tronxy devices, this was actually a factor before buying the printer. ...

What is MATS and MODS MATS stands for memory automated test system and MODS stands for modular diagnostics software and are two pieces of software “leaked” from NVIDIA. About the leak part - I don’t know, I don’t care. I just need proper debugging of a potential broken graphics cards. As the market for graphics card is currently crazy, I’d rather try to properly diagnose my card before spending an insane amount of money for a new one. ...

Why do I need multiple Accounts? There certain hard-limits in AWS services you can’t raise, even with a support ticket. So make sure you don’t hit them. Otherwise scaling out will be a pain. WTF? How should I manage this in terraform? RTMF? Also, this is basically build on my folder structure, which you can find here. Set up the provider (careful, this is 0.12 syntax!) this changed since terraform 0.13! I will update this soon. ...