Initially I just wanted to setup a relay for a tubelight with my Raspberry Pi Pico W. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any HomeKit libraries for it. However I found one for the ESP8266 which I happened to have lying around in the form of a NodeMCU. HomeKit is a framework…

I have been using an RTLSDR to listen to the airwaves for more than 10 years now. I started off listening to VHF/UHF since that is what was supported out of the box on the older dongles. There was plenty of traffic, from local ham stations to BESCOM to analog…

Did this as a fun project in a couple of hours. DHT11 sensor attached to a Pi Pico W pushing data to a InfluxDB + Grafana on a Pi 4B. Challenges Interfacing the DHT11 sensor with the Pi Pico W There are multiple posts on the internet with misleading pinouts…

Terraform AWS provider works with only one region at a time. If we want to work on multiple regions, provider aliases need to be used. But using a variable value for this in a resource block or within a module is not possible. Given a map of regions and VPC…

In a usual setting, Terraform pulls the provider binaries from the internet. But if you are in a restricted network without access to these binaries, Terraform would not work. I was faced with a similar situation at work but on GCP. But GCP handles internal API endpoint connectivity differently compared…

I was looking to have a cluster for learning more Kubernetes but minikube was just not cutting it and full fledged k8s was too heavy for a Pi setup. Enter k3s. Its a much lighter version of k8s without compromising on the API features. Its very ideal for bringing up…

The SD card on one of my Pi Zero Ws died and now I have to set it back up again on a new one. It was running Pi-hole along with a few other stuff. For those that don’t know; Pi-hole is a open source, network-wide ad blocking solution that…

If you’ve ever installed the lite version of the Raspberry OS, you’ll know that this version of the OS does not come with any display drivers and is meant to be run headless. I installed it on my Pi Zero W recently since its a SBC with very low specs…

Port knocking is a security technique used to secure servers. Connection is attempted to a sequence of ports to open or close an application/service port. UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) is available on all recent Ubuntu versions. knockd installation: apt install knockd knockd configuration file: /etc/knockd.conf [options] UseSyslog [SSH] sequence = 7000,8000,9000 seq_timeout = 5 start_command = ufw allow from %IP% to any port 22 tcpflags = syn cmd_timeout = 10 stop_command = ufw delete allow from %IP% to any port 22