After my scare with the Z-wave controller dying due to SD card failure (See the blog post), I decided that my Zigbee network is important enough to back up, especially because a whole lot more important data is stored on disk rather than in the dongle as with Z-wave. I’m going to follow the same path I took in the Z-wave blog, but for Zigbee2MQTT. Since it’s running ‘bare’ on a raspberry pi, I can’t just backup the whole virtual machine.

In my previous tests using Software Defined Radio (SDR), I used rtl_433 to successfully receive data from an outdoor weather station sensor. Always seeking more data, I found rtlamr - a tool which decodes smart meter data. I don’t really need to read smart meter data since the only smart meter I have is my power meter and I already have my own meter for that, but I still was excited to give it a try and see what I could find!

As mentioned in my last blog post, I setup an autofs share to mount my NAS for backups. Since I’ve always used fstab in the past to mount this, and it’s quite unreliable for cifs shares, and some internet articles go into way more detail than necessary on setting up autofs, here’s a very quick overview on setting up samba / CIFS shares with autofs on Raspberry Pi OS (or any other Debian / Ubuntu based system).

I got my Z-Wave Raspberry Pi setup a few weeks ago, and then spent a ton of time setting up my Bedroom Lights, Bathroom Fan+Light, and ordered even more Z-wave hardware. I also started up an RTL-433 server for a yet unfinished project, and about a week later, Home Assistant suddenly reported all of my Z-wave devices offline. Home Assistant was unable to connect to the WebSocket of ZWaveJS. The Pi was acting really weird.

Everyone who has 3D printed something is at least vaguely aware of the concept of infill. Unless you want your 3D prints to be totally solid, you usually reduce the density of the center of the part, creating a number of solid layers around a central void. The percentage of this central void that is filled with material is known as the infill ratio. A lot of slicers will automatically pick some level of infill and some pattern to distribute the material in the most structurally sound way, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick to these settings.

I’ve wanted to document my projects for a few years, after following plenty of other creators with excellent project documentation, but I’ve never found the time to start. This is my start. I’ve built my personal website, created content for back projects worth sharing with the world, and I’m committed to continuing to document and share the things that I make. All In The Name I started off with choosing a name.

As all of you can appreciate, my interest in projects varies with time. At any given time, I have plenty of projects in process, and my moods change which projects I work on at any given time. Given that information, here’s an update on what I’m working on currently: Cheap PoE Fisheye Camera for 3D Printing - This project finished months ago, but I wrote a detailed review of the camera and published it.