Featured image of post Over-engineering a home air quality dashboard

Over-engineering a home air quality dashboard

Air—it’s invisible, I can’t see it, but I feel effects of it in so many ways, temperature, humidity, gas composition, but I lacked sensors to measure it. In this post, I walk through some different Air Quality sensors that I found and how I wired them up into a dashboard. Prerequisite Software This project depends on a few software components. This post will assume that you have these set up already.

Accurate, Local Home Energy Monitoring: Part 3 – Software Config

This article is part of the Home Energy Monitoring series.

In the previous post in this series, I selected an energy monitoring system that is purely local based (no cloud), integrates into the breaker box, and showed how to connect it to the network and configure the size of each circuit. In this post, I’ll show how to connect the BrulTech GreenEye Energy Monitor to HomeAssistant and create some useful monitoring dashboards. GreenEye Monitor Firmware While trying to connect my monitor to Home Assistant, I came across a firmware bug in the GreenEye Monitor and found a forum thread that Brultech had a bug with their packet formats which has been fixed in firmware version 5.

Split Horizon DNS with external-dns and cert-manager for Kubernetes

There were a few services that I ran that I wanted to be able to access from both inside my home network and outside my home network. If I was inside my home network, I wanted to route directly to the service, but if I was outside I needed to be able to route traffic through a proxy that would then route into my home lab. Additionally, I wanted to support SSL on all my services for security using cert-manager

Best Practices for Java testing with JUnit

JUnit is a popular testing library for Java applications and I extensively used it when working at Amazon for the numerous Java applications and services there. However, I came across a number of different anti-patterns and areas to improve the quality of the test code. This post introduces many of the different tricks and patterns that I’ve learned and shared with my coworkers, and now want to share Another library to know and reference is Mockito, which I use extensively in JUnit test cases and will reference this too below.

How to build a useful service data change audit log

If you’ve got a service that provides clients with the ability to make changes to those entities, then you probably want an audit log that tracks who makes what changes. I decided to write this post because I frequently saw teams at Amazon not thinking through these considerations. Some of the guidance does focus on AWS IAM, but a lot of it is practical for any type of audit log.