Last Updated 2/26/2017 Table of Contents: Method 1: Configure the ObserverIP destination hostname using telnet Method 2: Redirect traffic using a router and iptables Accepting the data on your server Creating a socket for use with weewx Undoing your changes and returning back to defaults How I use this data to run my own website! Recently I received an Ambient Weather WS-1200-IP weather station. It’s a great unit and very easy to use and setup! There is an outdoor unit which does temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV and solar radiation. There’s also an indoor unit which has a barometer sensor. The 2 sensors talk to an ObserverIP unit. This unit plugs directly into your router and has a little webpage [Read More…]
DIY Solar Powered Remote Timelapse Camera with 4G LTE
My wife and I are in the process of building our house. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to timelapse the build. The idea of making a video of “5 months in 2 minutes” is really interesting to me. So I got myself an off-the-shelf construction timelapse camera. Tested it out, and the quality was disappointing. I suppose being a wedding photographer I demanded more from a photography project. So I did what any tech nerd photographer would do — I built my own timelapse rig! Except this time I one-upped it and added solar power on a timer, with a wireless AP and 4G LTE modem. This allows for instant uploads to my computer. This post is my attempt at documenting [Read More…]
TornadoChannel.com Launched!
When Mike Olbinski asked for some help with a WordPress plugin to display a map with his live GPS position on it, I knew I could do it. I also knew there was an opportunity for something bigger here. Enter TornadoChannel.com! TornadoChannel.com was created and developed by me with a lot of input from Mike on features. As more storm chasers start streaming their chase to YouTube, it’s becoming difficult for viewers to find new chasers to subscribe to. Enter TornadoChannel. It is not a streaming platform but instead a centralized location for viewers to watch and chat. In the past, people looking on YouTube for live storm streams would have to bookmark individual channels of chasers. Now they can find them all [Read More…]
Setup a Raspberry Pi Kiosk with Chromium
I’ve setup my Raspberry Pi 3 to be a digital signage kiosk. I’ve installed the Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT Plus touch screen, and am using it to show my weather station data in real time. This is done by having the Raspberry Pi auto log in and run Chromium to open a webpage. I’ve shared how I’ve setup a full digital signage system using Ubuntu and Chromium for Kiosk mode. This post will repeat a lot of the same in that article, but tailor it to the Raspberry Pi. Here’s how I did it: Setup Raspbian The first step is to get Raspbian Jesse installed, perform sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and if you have the Adafruit 3.5″ touchscreen installed, run through their [Read More…]
Setup a Kiosk with Ubuntu and Chromium
Recently I’ve had the need to setup 2 kiosk stations to display an array of data on a digital signage screen which has no keyboard or mouse attached to it. The idea in this post is to explain how I did it. I installed Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, set some auto-login tasks and run Chromium in kiosk mode. Then using xdotool to cycle through the Chrome tabs at a set interval. Lastly, the unclutter package will remove the mouse cursor from the screen, giving a clean automated look. I also show how I’ve set this up for a Raspberry Pi. It’s mostly the same, but a few things are different. Check it out if you have a Raspberry Pi [Read More…]
Using grep on live active log files
I had a need recently to where I needed to grep an Apache httpd log file to see if a certain web subfolder was accessed. I wanted to grep the access log file which has historical and live data coming into it, and found this to be a great solution. Sharing it here in case it helps someone in the future! In this example, dd87946d06c23e was the name of the folder I was looking to see was accessed. tail -f -n 5000 /var/log/httpd/access_log | grep –line-buffered dd87946d06c23e
Use GeoIP and htaccess to deny countries access to your website
I run about a dozen websites, and one of them switched over to the XenForo forum software. The problem with forums is once the spambots find it, they’re registering like crazy. My best efforts to use CAPTCHA didn’t work well. Then I added a question which uses AJAX to verify the answer against an external API. That helped but they were still able to figure out a valid answer. They then were manually verifying the registration via email. My best efforts to stop them really only slowed them down. I wanted it to end. Using a self-hosted Piwik analytics instance (I love Piwik) I was able to determine that most of the spammers came from India and China. I could have added those two countries known IPs [Read More…]
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The purpose of this site is for me to share my DIY technical experiences as a place to document them publicly. Hopefully somewhere along the way they are helpful for you.
