It’s an escape room in a box. A co-op puzzle game I made to infuriate my friends. The video above details the game play and brief technical details about my Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes clone. You’ll want to watch that now. For the detailed technical write up, check out the project page at https://heathbar.github.io/keep-talking…
RGB Motherboard Wall
I made an accent wall from motherboards and RGB LEDs…
Saving Money with Custom RxJs Operators
Let’s say we have a power meter like the one that sense makes. Let’s also say that the API for this power meter is a little underwhelming. In this hypothetical situation, we can fetch the current home power usage so we could certainly wire up an observable stream to this API and (assuming we’re using…
Home Automation Dashboard
Hardware I recently put together this Home Automation Dashboard. The screen was pulled from an old laptop and the computer is an older SFF PC running linux. The application is a relatively simple Angular application that streams most of the data from a Home Assistant websocket. The PC sits in a box in the wall…
More LED Furniture
I built two pieces of furniture recently. AV Table First is a new AV cabinet for my home theater. First, I selected several species of wood and cut them down to the same size. Next came the puzzle of laying out the pieces. The ends of the slab were cut off at 45° to make…
Bionic Beaver on Xen on Bionic Beaver (18.04) pt1
Prep Head on over to ubuntu and grab an iso. I chose ubuntu-18.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso, but by the time you’re reading this there is probably something newer. Burn the ISO to a USB disk or a DVD if you’re feeling particularly patient. To LVM or not to LVM At this point many guides will recommend you partition your…
Watch/transpile/refresh loop with an Angular 6 component library
TL;DR Update tsconfig.json to reference the library project instead of the dist folder The Problem With recent updates to the angular cli, it’s now trivial to setup and package an angular component library. However, developing changes in that component library can be a clunky process. The goal of this post is to get your components…
(Technically an LED) Chandelier
I recently built a chandelier for a friend. There aren’t any “smarts” on this project, but technically it’s an LED light. The beam is made from three 2x6s that I purchased at a local reclaimed-wood shop. I bound them together by wrapping them in a flat piece of steel that is bolted at the top…
Sending MQTT messages on Raspberry Pi GPIO changes
I have had a node app that watches for changes to my Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and sends an MQTT message as part of my home automation setup. Recently I re-imaged my pi and much to my dismay really struggled to install the requisite libraries. Instead of banging my head against that wall any…
Debugging golang with IDE support in vs code on ubuntu
Getting Started I’ve been dipping my toes into go development lately. Up to this point I’ve debugged my applications through the ancient practice of console printing. But no more. If you haven’t already, I’d suggest you start by following this guide as they are probably more informed than I am. However, I ran into a…