Raspberry Pi emulation with Qemu

The idea here is that we use a Desktop PC for developing/debugging Raspberry Pi set-ups using qemu for emulating Rasperrby Pi.

qemu currently supports the following configurations:

  • Raspberry Pi Zero and 1A+ (armhf)
  • Raspberry Pi 2B (armv7)
  • Raspberry Pi 3A+ (aarch64)
  • Raspberry Pi 3B (aarch64)
    • This is the version …

Home Assistant Wall Panel

For a while I was using TabletClock with old tablets. But this has not been updated in a while. I was thinking of writing my own version until I found WallPanel.

Essentially it is purposely built web-browser with special features which makes it possible to use it to replaces TabletClock …

RDP vs VNC

For years I have been using VNC for my remote desktop needs. This works usually well enough. The features that I like are:

  • Basic set-up is easy
  • Desktop sessions are persistent
  • Can be used to view an actual X11.org desktop.
  • Browser based clients via noVNC or Guacamole

On the …

QNAP Snapshots

I wrote a small tool to access QNAP snapshots from the Linux command line.

Pre-requistes:

  • Snapshots have to be enabled
  • You need a /share/netcfg containing the file:
    • In my case, I set this share as read-only with root-squash.
    • `admin.yaml' : contains the private/public keys and the configuration of …

Docker on Void

This is a quick recipe to run Docker on void:

  • Make sure your system is up-to-date:
    • sudo xbps-install -Syu
  • Install docker executables:
    • sudo xbps-install -S docker
  • Check if docker was installed properly:
    • docker --version
  • Enable services:
    • sudo ln -s /etc/sv/containerd /var/service
    • sudo ln -s /etc/sv/docker …

Home Assistant Behind Reverse Proxy

To set-up a reverse proxy I took the following steps:

  • configure DNS
  • get Letsencrypt certificates
  • Configure NGINX
  • Configure Home Assistant to trust the proxy

At the time of this writing I can't really confirm if the reverse proxy configuration for home assistant is working as I can't tell what IP …

Looking up docker image tags

This recipe is to check the tags defined for a specific Docker image in docker.hub.

The basic API is at https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2

So the format is as follows:

https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/{namespace}/{image}/tags/

Where:

  • namespace : usually is the user account …

Home Assistant Large Clock

This recipe is my version of providing a "large clock" face in the home assistant dashboard.

Enable serving local static files:

  • Create directory www in your config directory.
  • Restart home assistant.
  • Static files are now available as http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/.

Place the HTML with your clock in a …

Moving to Home Assistant

I am busy moving away from my VeraEdge installation to a Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 4. This is because it looks like the maker of the VeraEdge was bought and it is slowly being phased out.

For this I am using the following parts:

cuylib

This is a tiny library to implement Web server embedded editor.

You can find it in github.

Can be used either from haserl or directly from a shell script.

Features:

  • Uses codemirror
  • Escaped HTML entities (html_enc)
  • Decode URL escaping (url_decode)
  • Read POST form data (post_data)
  • Parse QUERY_STRING (query_string and query_string_raw …