Monthly Archives: August 2021

My favourite Raspberry Pi 4 cases

Every Raspberry Pi deserves protection. Having used these boards since the first iteration, I have tried many cases over the years, all of them with their strengths and weaknesses. Now I’ve settled on a couple of firm favourites – both from Argon40. And to get this out of the way up-front, this post is not sponsored in any way. I’m… Read more »

ESP32 room thermometer: with 18650 battery level indicator

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The TTGO ESP32 microcontroller board that I’m using for a room thermometer project comes with a battery connect and charging circuitry for a Li-Ion cell. It would be so much easier to deploy the thermometer if I could run it off a battery. And it works. Kinda. There are issues, though…. Read more »

Network monitoring #2: Logging CPU temps with InfluxDB and Grafana

My previous method of logging the CPU temperatures of machines on the network involved a Bash script sending out a message via MQTT. This was intercepted and logged by a Python script running on a server, which wrote the data to text files in a place where the intranet server could see them. Phew! It’s a miracle it worked. But… Read more »

Battery-powered ESP32 IoT room thermometer with OLED display

A while back, I made a couple of ESP8266-based room thermometers. These have been beavering away happily ever since – one on the desk in my office and one in the living room (or salon as we say in France). The only significant change I’ve made to them is to add the capability for them to report temperatures to an… Read more »

Network monitoring #1: Server temperatures, MQTT and Bash

It’s always a good idea to know the state of the machines on your network. Plus, I’m a geek, and messing around with data appeals to me. One metric I especially like to keep an eye on is CPU temperature. Why? Why not? I’ve recently got into InfluxDB and Grafana, and that’s the way all future projects will be going…. Read more »