Category: Projects

30 April 2024

MAME Cabinet Raspberry Pi 4

An old Taito standup arcade cabinet that I’d previously kitted out with MAME, came back from storage and I decided to refit it with something more maintainable. MAME and emulation should be a lot simpler now than it was back then shouldn’t it?

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28 April 2023

Cheaper Sodastreaming with bulk CO2

We like our bubbly water, and although you can get fridges that carbonate… they are horrendously expensive. The next best thing is a sodastream machine, but again… this can be a huge cost if you stick to the sodastream brand cartridges. So, what options are there to DIY ?

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2 August 2021

Viewsonic Touch Screen for Home Assistant Display

Use of a pretty old Viewsonic All-in-One computer as a home automation display. I picked a couple of these up for around NZ$40 each, however found the touch screen didn’t work out of the box as drivers were missing from Linux.

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27 July 2021

Home Automation of Rinnai Gas Heater

Our Rinnai heater is a wall mounted/flued gas fire. Current control is via a large LCD remote control that also acts as the temperature sensor, and thermostat. It has some auto timing capability via way of programming the remote, but it is a bit clunky and not intuitive. The goal was to enable a better PID control of the temperature, and switch off/on control (occupancy, remotely before arrival, voice control, better scheduling etc). This shows how I connected to it with Home Assistant.

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13 November 2019

Home Automation: Future Thinking

So, home control with your own setup is great, but you have to think about what happens in the event you sell your house, get hit by a bus or someone needs to work on it in the future. Home Automation should add value to a house, not turn people off a sale. This is part 2 of some of...

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13 November 2019

Home Automation: Electrical Safety

This is part one of some of my notes regarding Home Automation concepts. Part 2 is about planning for the future and house resale value. Electrical Isolation/Safety Electrical safety is very important obviously for home automation, and as well as my tendency to over-engineer, I’m often thinking about ‘what could possibly go wrong‘. One of the things I want to...

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8 July 2019

Conversion of Ceiling Attic to Storage

In 2019 I converted a ceiling space atticin our current house to storage (on a budget). You can never have enough home storage. This is the 5th type of install I’ve done like this (Similar in 4 previous houses), and as well as being useful, home buyers love it (if done well).

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19 May 2018

Tips: Get Your Cabling in Tricky Places

Do you have an existing house or structure and trying to get a cable into a tricky place?  Here are a few tips from methods I have used over the years. Conduit Sucker There is nothing more annoying than finding a broken cable in a conduit or pipe and having nothing to pull the replacement wire though.  it is especially...

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15 January 2017

1965 Zephyr Deluxe Caravan Restoration

These are the before and after photos of our 1965 15″ Zephyr Deluxe Caravan. It was apparently stored in a shed for 20 years so apart from some general decay, some borer and a bunch of broken and missing stuff, the layout and fittings were mostly original. We had it mostly as we got it for a couple of years...

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19 April 2016

Upgrading a 5 Year Old Samsung Galaxy S2 to Android M

I needed a phone for my son as he had been given an older ZTE V795 phone running Android Gingerbread. The ridiculous thing about this is that besides the fact there is really no way to easily upgrade or change out the ROM on this phone… you can’t even update the current setup as any ‘play store’ updates fail even...

Categories Mobile Phones & Android/Projects Comments: 9

17 February 2016

My Photobooth Project…

I needed a photobooth for my wedding (this was one of my few assigned wedding tasks!). You know, one of those ‘take a few photos of guests, and print them’ sort of thing, like the early film ones . Early on, I built up a list of things I really wanted to achieve with it, as there are many options...

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27 January 2016

How I manage and share 1000s of digital photographs

People often ask me for the best way to store their thousands of photos, and I’ve tried a bunch of ways in the past. I take masses of photos (SLRs, Action Cams, Pocket Cams and phones), and running my own commercial (colocated) server has allowed me to use applications such as Gallery, Piwigo and other server apps to store, manage and display...

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10 June 2015

How about some Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. There are lots of different things you can...

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3 March 2015

Tips to create easy Tag Cloud Artwork

You’ve seen them… those pictures made up of lots of words. You can create these pretty easily at Tagxedo, but it is handy to have a few tips as to how to get the best out of it. They make great family presents, and you can use all the words that are personal & meaningful to the person you are...

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10 March 2014

You need a Zombie Apocalypse Kit

I must admit I was once a Boy Scout… and tend to like to be prepared for stuff. Sometimes more than I really need to be! Ok, I haven’t yet seen a Zombie (except for my son on Halloween) but there have been a number of Earthquakes in Christchurch New Zealand, and the fact that there are over 50 Volcanoes...

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