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…]
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…]
Using Nagios to monitor your power outlets
I’m a huge fan of Nagios. I’ve installed it at work and it provides us simple up/down information, as well as detailed service information. Being able to customize the level of monitoring detail has been a huge benefit. Nagios doesn’t just stop at the workplace — I run it at home too. I’m monitoring my weather station, Raspberry Pis, SmartThings hub, IoT WiFi devices, my small lab Asterisk PBX and websites I’ve created for businesses, family and friends. It’s important to me that I run a healthy environment — whether it’s in my house or not. I had a situation recently where the GFCI outlet that my air conditioner’s condensate pump was plugged into had popped it’s breaker and turned [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…]
Raspberry Pi – How to spoof MAC address
I’ve tried a lot of Raspberry Pi projects and the only one I’ve stuck with is tracking airplanes using ADSB and feeding that data to FlightAware using their PiAware system. The PiAware image for the Pi uses the eth0 MAC address to create a unique ID for the feeder you’re running. The downside with doing this is that if your Raspberry Pi breaks, dies, or if you upgrade to a new one like the Raspberry Pi 3, then PiAware will create a whole new feeder site. So much for your awesome feeder streak! The solution is to spoof your eth0 MAC address on the new Raspberry Pi! I’ve done this method with 3 Raspberry Pi upgrades for PiAware and have a [Read More…]
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.