GCP ACE

My path to becoming a Google Cloud Platform Associate Engineer

Google Cloud Platform Associate Cloud Engineer Certification The past few months, I did spend quite some of my leisure time getting my Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certification. I have always been interested in understanding infrastructure and doing operational work. In my current job, we do use GCP quite extensively for our infrastructure needs and consequently I was given the opportunity there to train on GCP. One of the approaches of learning for a cloud platform turned out to be registering for GCP certification. [Read More]

Revamping the blog

Migrating from jekyll to hugo

Why It has been a long time since I have dedicated some time to posting something on this blog. Over the past years, I think I have spent quite some of my spare time examining things, coding, etc.. The main reason I would want to write again is that I believe it should help me scope things a bit more. I have had this idea already a couple of times before, but the whole blogging setup had become a bit of a nuisance to me. [Read More]

unifi terraform

unifi cloud key infrastructure-as-code

Last week, I did write about resetting my unifi cloud key. The main reason I did gain a renewed interest in the cloud key was because I wanted to add some more fixed IPs to my home network. One of the nice things about the unifi controller software is that it provides a single dashboard interface to manage everything network-related. On the downside, the interface is overall quite limited. While it does offer DHCP (the fixed IPs) in this fashion, it does not offer built-in DNS (e. [Read More]

cloud key reset

unifi cloud key factory reset

After my last password issues post, I still had some places for which I didn’t have an easy approach to reset the login. For my local network, I still use a unifi cloud key gen 1, to keep an overview of the network. Cloud key The ubiquiti unifi cloud key is a small client device on the local network, specifically running the ubiquiti unifi controller software. The controller software is there to e. [Read More]

Password troubles

gpg + pass part deux

Last Saturday, my new phone arrived in the mail. As a techie, I was naturally delighted to get my new treat up and running. Both my old and my new phone are Android phones and I was surprised to see how (shockingly) easy it was to migrate all my stuff. Not all settings were migrated directly though; mostly passwords would need to be set up again. Since I did use gnu pass + GPG for my password management as described in my previous password management post earlier this year, I figured this would be quite easy to do! [Read More]

modbusbackup

An alternative approach to connecting unipi units

Another home automation post! Please check out my earlier home automation series first to get an idea what I am talking about. Recently, I figured to rework some part of it to be able to deal better with certain kind of failures, while at the same time still being able to offer all the automation abilities as before. Recap First, let’s recap the architecture that was already in place: inputs: a unipi unit is used to read the digital inputs (e. [Read More]

evok2mqtt ansible

Automating an evok2mqtt install

As part of my home automation series, I did write about a small interfacing library that I did write, called evok2mqtt. The purpose of this service is to translate between two different protocols: websockets, as exposed by evok and mqtt, which is the primary protocol I did use in communicating with home assistant. If you’d like to get more details about the setup itself, check the blog post series first. [Read More]

Service

Home assistant as the service layer

Up to this point, I did already lay out all of the tidbits concerning the electricity, the I/O hardware units, even some custom software to provide an event-based API to address all of the various components in the overall system. The final fundamental piece to bring everything together is what I call the service layer, and specifically home assistant. This post is a part of a larger series of posts on my home automation setup. [Read More]

Software

Connecting the pieces together

After connecting everything on the different “physical” layers, it is time to have a look at how to connect all on the software side of things. This post shall describe my current setup, specifically the different software components and the protocols they rely on for the unipi hardware. This post is a part of a larger series of posts on my home automation setup. See the home automation overview post, to learn about the rationale and a description of the other posts! [Read More]

Hardware

Unipi units

In this post, I will give some more details about the rationale for the hardware that I had chosen for interpreting the input signals and controlling the outputs, specifically the unipi neuron series. Note that I am in no way affiliated with unipi, nor do I intend to do an in-depth description of their hardware. For more details from unipi themselves, have a look at the unipi website. This post is a part of a larger series of posts on my home automation setup. [Read More]