Geek's Code Corner

If you’re looking for a straightforward yet powerful method to safeguard your home or office, a smart motion sensor linked to Home Assistant might be the perfect solution for you. This way, you can establish a basic alarm system that can recognize and inform you of any unanticipated movements in your area. Regardless of whether you’re present or not, you can rest easy knowing that your property is being watched over around the clock. This article will demonstrate how to create this setup. Also for those wanting to use the sensor to switch on/off a light this post can be of value. Getting started Before you dive in, it’s important to check out our previous posts on “getting Home Assistant up and running with MQTT and ZigBee” as a starting point. Once you’ve got that set up, you can follow along with our working installation of Home Assistant with MQTT and ZigBee2MQTT already up and running. To get started, all you need are some ZigBee-compatible motion sensors. I opted for one from SilverCrest that I found on discount at the local grocery store, but other options should work just as well. To begin, simply follow the instructions that come with Read more…

Monitoring the air quality in spaces where you spend a lot of time can be a game-changer for your well-being and productivity. However, the air quality monitor built-in a previous post is tightly linked with Home Assistant (HA), which might limit its use in environments like offices, workshops, garages, and more. The good news? We can easily add additional LEDs and link them to the new sensor values directly in ESPHome, so those will work even when not connected to HA. Furthermore, the esp8266 is just powerful enough to function as a WiFi access point while hosting a web page that displays all sensor readings. This guide will walk you through adding additional status LEDs and reconfiguring ESPHome to unlock this stand-alone functionality, turning your air quality monitor into a tool that can be used anywhere! What you need? This post will start from the DIY smart air quality sensor which you can build from an IKEA Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor, an ESP8266 and Bosch BME680 (humidity, pressure, temperature and volatile organic compound (VOC) sensor). Though we can additionally add two white LEDs, that can be programmed to give a visual cue to the BME680 readings and hence make it Read more…

With USB type C ports now commonplace, keeping micro-USB cables around for some devices can be a bit of a nuisance.The convenience of a single, reversible cable for nearly all your devices is undeniable, and in some devices the micro-USB port can actually be replaced with a USB type C one… given you aren’t afraid of a little soldering. Before tackling more intricate electronics, let’s start small — a simple mod for the Raspberry Pi Pico the perfect way to get started. Requirements This project calls for some essential soldering tools. A soldering iron, sponge, and solder should be enough to get you started. Along with these tools, you’ll need a few additional components: a Raspberry Pi Pico four pieces of electrical wire (which I salvaged from an old USB cable) a female USB Type-C breakout board that exposes the ground (GND), voltage (V), data plus (D+), and data minus (D-) pins (Note: If you plan to use a USB-C to USB-C cable, it should support power delivery.) Selecting the right breakout board is crucial, as not all boards are suitable for this project. For this modification, search for a board that exposes the GND, V, D+, and D- pins Read more…

KeyForge is often advertised as having 104 septillion possible decks per set (that is 104 followed by 24 zeros), but how many of those decks actually exist? Fantasy Flight Games never released data on how many decks were printed per run. Though with Dark Tiding having Evil Twin decks (exact copies of other decks, but with Evil versions of certain cards), we can actually estimate the total number of decks printed! This allows us to get a grasp of which percentage of decks are registered. How to estimate the number of printed Dark Tidings decks ? In the previous post a trick used in ecology, called Capture-Mark-Recapture, to estimate the number of animals in a given population, without counting all of them was shown. The basis for this strategy is visiting the site twice, and being able to capture animals each time independently. The first time captured animals are marked and released, the second time around the total number of animals caught and how many of those were marked is recorded. From those numbers you can, using a relatively simple formula, estimate the total population size. To apply this to KeyForge, Evil-Twin decks in Dark Tidings are key (pun intended). Read more…

Imagine you wish to know how many fish are in a rather large pond… The water is murky so forget about counting them easily… In ecology this is a common problem! The population size of a species often needs to be known, but it is either impractical or simply impossible to count all individual members of that population. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy solution to get an estimation! To estimate the size of the population you would have to visit the site twice. On the first visit a number of animals are caught, marked and released. It is important to mark them in a way it doesn’t do them any disadvantage or harm, equally important is to use marks that don’t easily rub off. You keep count of how many members of the population were caught and marked. Next, a day or so later, the site is visited again and a number of animals is caught. This time the number of marked animals that were recaptured is important. As the fraction of the marked individuals captured the second day, is essentially the same as the fraction of the population that was marked the first day. This method goes by Read more…