Solved: new hard disk is not recognized on internal SATA port
The problem Recently, I consolidated several old, small hard drives in my server onto a single new, large hard drive. The problem was that this drive was not detected on any of the internal SATA ports but worked just fine in an external USB docking station. How can that be? SATA ports and cables are easy to test and were not the culprit. The cable harnesses in my server do not connect to 3.3V because of issues with shucked drives. So, the 3.3V pin should not be the issue here and, indeed, the new drive, a Toshiba MG07ACA, does not use the 3V3 rail at all as the manual states on page 11. So what gives? The solution As it turns out, the disk spins up too slowly! It is not ready when the BOIS/UEFI checks for disks and is therefore ignored once the disk is up to speed and…
Water monitoring
Conserving resources is an important topic and always worth pursuing. The current energy prices and inflation just add a higher monetary incentive for everyone to make more effort. I took this as a trigger to see if and how much water, especially warm water, I can save in my household. As with all improvement projects, you need to know your current baseline before you can measure any improvements. The nice, but impractible solution Ideally, I would want a continous measurement of my water usage, so every change can be tracked. The usual analog water meters are not ideal for this task, but it is not too complicated to set up an ESP32 with an ESPcam to digitize the meters. A little bit of machine learning to detect the numbers and the spinning wheel will give very precise readings throughout the whole day. Unfortunately, this setup is not practible as I…
New server front panels
Replacing the boring front panels on my rack-mount cases is a great oppurtunity to learn about laser cutting fabrication and sheet metal bending.
homeclimate V1.5
Since I have a NAS/server running a TIG stack (Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana) for monitoring, it is straight forward to log all sensor data to this machine instead of the Raspberry Pi. The server is consuming a low amount of power, it is running 24/7 to offer its services around the clock and can deal with a little bit of additionally data no problem. This also has the benefit to deliver long time series much quicker than the small Raspberry Pi. Plotting half a year of 30s intervall data in Grafana on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ is a nice stress test – it maxes out the CPU for several minutes and puts a lot of stress on the SD-Card. Apropos SD cards: A reminder to a note in the first part of this buildNever, and I mean NEVER, run influxdb or any other database for more than a short test on an SD…
home climate V1
In 2018, a colleague mentioned to me that he found a nice CO2 monitor with an undocumented but open USB connection. On Github, vfilimonov wrote a nice python package to decode the USB connection and show the measured data on a website. From this starting point on, I experimented with further sensors and a more complex data acquisition, storage and visualisation. The current state is an experimental setup running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. Several sensors are connected to test and compare them. Connected sensors are: TFA Dostmann AirCO2ntrol Mini CO2 Monitor Two DHT22 temperature and humidity MH-Z19 IR absorption CO2 sensor 0-5000ppm TSL 2561 light intensity sensor BMP280 digital barometer The monitoring system in the configuration as used in the following. Raspbian Buster runs from an old SSD that also stores programs and databases (black cable with two USB port because the Pi cannot supply enough current). The white…
Homeserver Power Monitoring
As mentioned in the introduction to the homeclimate monitoring project, I run a small unRAID homeserver with a couple of disks to provide some services in my local network. Besides monitoring the server itself with the TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana), it is also interesting to monitor power consumption to find out what the server costs aside from the initial cost for the hardware. Self-made solutions operating on mains voltages is always tricky and the potential risks are large. Luckily, there are a number of cheap and easy commercial options. I opted for the “TP-Link Kasa smart plug HS110” which is available online for typically less than 20€. The HS110 can monitor voltage, current, power and turn on/off the integrated outlet remotely. It also has smart home feature (e.g. Alexa skills, Google Assistant, IFTTT) but I don’t need nor want those. Still, it is one of the cheapest and also…
rsync backup
Backups with rsync I am currently running an unRAID homeserver to provide data and a few services on my local network. The Synology Diskstation 416 that it replaced, now serves as the backup target.After testing several backup solutions, I think a simple rsync script is enough for what I need. It cannot offer fancy stuff but is a reliable and well tested tool. A few notes on how I came to this conclusion: The backup target (DS 416) is local and set up with disk encryption, so I don’t need a tool with built-in encryption (neither storage, nor transmission). Deduplication is nice to have but in my case reduced the backup size only by a few hundred GB – almost nothing compared to several TB of data. Incremental backups will keep the required disk space low anyway. Hardware function name description backup source homeserver unRAID server with a couple of…