Last Updated 2/26/2017 I have 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 that you configure your wunderground.com username with. Once you click save, it instantly starts uploading data to wunderground.com. Couldn’t be easier to start sharing your weather station data! Except. I want that data. I want to archive it on my own system. I want to be able to report off it. The little [Read More…]
How to setup your own MQTT Broker
I wrote this MQTT tutorial to help me out in the future, but hopefully it helps someone else along the way! For the last few years I’ve been running a custom weather website. This website, in conjunction with weewx, allowed me to have a website which updated itself every 10 seconds. But this bothered me. 10 seconds was far too slow for my liking! Earlier this year (2018) I started using Home Assistant for home automation (goodbye old unreliable cloud-based automation!) and they opened me up to MQTT. It was great to be able to get data from tiny Arduino sensors around the house — but I knew I could do more with it. That’s when I saw an MQTT [Read More…]
Nest Thermostat Push Notifications
I have 2 Nest thermostats in my house. They’re great! No doubt they have saved me money since the first day. The one thing that’s bothered me though is the lack of push notifications. Perhaps it’s overkill but I like to know what my thermostat is doing such as changing setpoint and operation mode. One of my thermostats is in my hallway and it’ll go into Eco mode if I don’t walk by it frequently enough. Having a push notice tell me that it’s in Eco mode now will enable me to open the app and get it back to heating or cooling. I couldn’t find a way to get these types of status notifications in the Nest app. The [Read More…]
mailx – Send automated Linux email with gmail
When something on my Linux servers needs to send email (WordPress, Nagios, cron scripts, etc), I use mailx. With the spam filters everyone has a lot of my automated emails haven’t been reaching their destination. I’ve done the SPF rules and making sure my forward matches my reverse DNS lookups; even have done DKIM. Can’t seem to find a reliable option with sending email from the command line without it getting flagged for spam. The fix was for me to use mailx with a gmail Account profile. This way any email sent from the system will get sent through the gmail servers. Since I host my email domain with GSuite, this was an easy win. I simply made a noreply [Read More…]
simplemonitor – who watches the Nagios watchman?
I rely on Nagios to monitor my smart home devices for me. I use it to get details on specific services and hosts and to notify me if any of them stop working or responding. One thing that’s always bothered me is that if Nagios stops running or if the Raspberry Pi it’s installed on stops working how will I know that it’s down? I don’t want to be in the dark and think that everything is fine. simplemonitor is the solution! Thanks to @jamesoff and his work on simplemonitor, I now have a reliable way to watch Nagios to make sure it doesn’t go belly up. The premise of simplemonitor is very much like Nagios. You first define a host, [Read More…]
Raspberry Pi and Nagios for reliable low cost monitoring
I love Nagios and I love Raspberry Pi’s. With my growing smart home and other projects, it only makes sense to monitor it all. To do that I use a Rapsberry Pi to run Nagios for low-cost reliable monitoring. I had Nagios running on a Virtual Machine but freeing up those resources and putting an old Pi to use is perfect. After you have Raspbian installed, update it using Then reboot the Pi so we have a fresh start. Once logged back in run During the installation it will prompt you for a password you want to use on the website. Enter it here, confirm it in the 2nd screen and remember it for later. The installation will continue to [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.