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Hey 👋 I’m Lemann: mark II

I like tech, bicycles, and nature.

Otherwise known as; @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Dancing Parrot wearing sunglasses

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  • 34 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • Not the case with ARM processors sadly, IMO they’re a bit of a mess from that perspective. Proprietary blobs for hardware, unusual kernel hacks for some devices, and no device tree support so you can’t just boot any image on any device. I think Windows for ARM encouraged some standardization in that regard, but for the most part looking at Android devices it’s still very much the wild west.

    This is one of the many reasons why Raspberry Pi ARM boards remain popular for the time being, despite there being so many other cheap alternatives available: they actually keep supporting their old boards & ensure hardware on their boards works from the get-go.

    There are also some rare cases where Raspberry Pi rewrite open source implementations of Broadcom’s proprietary blob drivers, in one instance for the built in CSI (optional camera)


  • No - however you could look for macro boards that have VIA firmware, as most of those can be configured using Chrome browser (WebHID), unless your org has an enterprise policy that interferes with that? The config software runs in Chrome as a website - so worth checking if the VIA keyboard web app is accessible on your work machine before purchasing a macro pad.

    VIA firmware stores the config in the keyboard’s internal eeprom AFAIK, so you should be able to setup your macros from another computer or android phone and still use them when connected to your work machine - unlike other software like Logitech Options where the config is deleted from the peripheral after a connection interruption…

    Does your employer have a policy allowing you to request software to be installed on your machine, especially if it’s needed for work? I had Logitech Options installed on my first day with no hassle from IT. Your situation sounds a lot like an unfortunate case of possibly power tripping IT admins doing more harm than good





  • I used to use MQTT, static_status and Healthchecks.io, and have that data passed through to Home Assistant, but it started to get pretty cumbersome as the amount of machines I had grew.

    I now use just Zabbix and HealthchecksIO. I did need to spend some time writing new templates for some additional data I wanted to collect (like SMART data for SSDs that provide health metrics in non-standard attributes, and HealthchecksIO so I could see the status of various checks on my zabbix dashboard)

    Zabbix also has some additional features I found appealing, like proxies that can continue recording data when the main server is down, and built in encryption. Some checks like open ports/icmp responses etc can be checked using either the local agent, the remote server, or both, which helps quickly diagnose things like firewall config issues.

    I did look at some other solutions, but I wanted something integrated to hit the ground running. Mobile apps are very limited, and there is no official one to my knowledge. I use Moobix which I don’t believe is FOSS - but I could be wrong there

    Try each solution out and see what works best for you!



  • IMO more accurate presence detection. Common sensors like PIR and cheaper doppler radar types can detect when there’s motion, but not if a user is present but not moving in the detection area (e.g. sleeping or sitting). There’s also open source projects that can track bluetooth wearables & phones to know who specifically is in a room, but these aren’t able to detect people with no devices, say guests and kids.

    The preferred approach at the moment is a combination of sensors to cover motion and person detection separately, which comes at a cost, both on your pocket and the time needed to get it working suitably for your needs, or maybe one of the more expensive radar sensors like the FP2 that can detect where in a space is occupied with higher accuracy than more affordable alternatives

    The thermal cam is roughly in the same price range as the FP2 - however since it has I2C, something cheap like an ESP8266 can be used to turn it into a WiFi based presence detection sensor. Something like an ESP32 could be used to turn it into a presence detector and wearable tracker, negating the need for another separate sensor entirely.

    Something like this would probably be quite close to plug and play for someone DIY focused, and wouldn’t have the same problem as radar being able to see through walls to different areas, although this is somewhat solved by surrounding the rear of the sensor in foil with caveats.

    I’m interested in how it performs outdoors in rain though, a lot of existing affordable sensors (except PIR) struggle a little in wet conditions, with doppler based ones not detecting anything



  • The [email protected] community would be a better fit for this post IMO

    That said this looks interesting, and seems really competitively priced when compared to other similar thermal cameras like the Flir One Gen 3. This measures a very wide temperature range too, from -20°C to 400°C within ±2°C, whereas the Gen 3 tops out at 120°C.

    The 80x62 resolution is OK for this application IMO, the Gen 3 is similar at 80x60.

    I wouldn’t go recommending one of these to a “casual” user though, it’s very much a development product. Non-casual users could probably 3d print a case and get on just fine with the demo apps IMO, and for those users this would probably worth its weight in gold, given how expensive thermal imaging usually is.

    Given how closely its priced to radar presence sensors like the Aqara FP2, and the inclusion of I2C for comms, I think this is going to have some appeal to DIY home automation enthusiasts too, especially if it gets supported by open source projects like ESPHome

    Technical docs: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/Thermal_Camera_HAT

    Edit: I should also mention that there are much cheaper options on sites like AliExpress if you just want something cheap to use via usb-c - the advantages this sensor has are heavily dev focused IMO and might not make sense for most users (e.g. documentation, i2c comms, product integration support)








  • Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.

    On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.

    Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.

    Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.

    There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.

    Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.

    I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds