Review

[Late post] I finally got around to installing permanent under eave roofline RGB lights, and I’ll share my experience and opinion of the Mattos RGB Trim I used. See my previous post and post on RGB holiday lights for background. I pre-ordered Mattos Engineering RGB Trim in December 2021 and received the shipment end of January 2022. The boxes have been sitting in my garage for a year, and I just got around to installing them mid December 2022. ...

I replaced my aging UniFi Security Gateway Pro and slow Circle Home Plus with a Firewalla Gold Plus, giving me gigabit speed firewall and parental controls in a single easy to use and actively developed device. Why Firewalla? We have 1Gbps internet, and I want a feature rich firewall that can operate at line speed. We do configure Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc. (homogeneous control remains lacking) child account restrictions, but I also want content control and visibility for any network connected devices. Firewalla is at the intersection of high speed and visibility and parental controls. ...

Every year on the hottest days and coldest nights, with the HVAC on, our bedrooms are either too hot or too cold, and I installed FLAIR Smart Vents to try and remedy the situation. In this post I am sharing my experience with the FLAIR installation and configuration, and my opinions and mini review of the Flair vents. Background First some history and background, skip to the installation or conclusion section for TL;DR. ...

The SSD in my Windows 10 system started reporting failures, and as luck would have it, died while I was cloning it to a new drive. I suspect death was caused by overheating, and I addressed that with my new setup. This Windows 10 system is in an NCase M1 v5 SFF case with an ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-I GAMING mini-ITX motherboard and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD drive. The motherboard has two M.2 slots, one on the front of the motherboard and one on the back. The slot on the front has a heatsink, but I noticed the drive runs hot even under no load. Some googling showed this to be a common problem with the heatsink and M.2 slot being heated by the motherboard chipset, so I moved the SSD to the slot on the back of the motherboard. The SSD still reported +60°C temperatures under load, and I added a passive heatsink, and that kept temperatures in the low 50°C’s even under load. ...

I planned a whole house energy monitoring setup when we built our house. But in all these years I never completed the Brultech GreenEye installation, I officially called that plan abandoned, and instead installed Sense energy monitors. First a bit of history, skip to the end if you’re not interested in my procrastination journey. I installed my first energy monitor, circa 2009, The Energy Detective TED-5000 connected to Google PowerMeter. Although our power utility (SCE) had installed smart meters, it took them several years, circa 2012, to enable Home Area Networks (HAN). I installed an EnergyHub Home Base, that turned out to be too unreliable due to the too long distance for ZigBee from the meter to our condo. I ordered the starter kit, that also included an energy monitoring power strip, but the power strip was unusable due to the excessively loud high frequency noise it generated. ...

Phyn Plus is a “smart water assistant”, a device that monitors water usage, and can automatically shut off the water supply when a leak is detected. I am familiar with whole house water monitoring and leak detection devices, like the widely available and advertised Moen Flo Smart Water Shutoff, but until very recently I’d never even heard of Phyn. I was introduced to Phyn by a tech savvy friend that bought one at Costco, installed it at his house, and he had only good things to say about it. ...

I finally took the plunge and moved from Unraid to Proxmox VE. I used to love Unraid, but at some point the easy to use web management UI and app store ecosystem simply lacked capabilities I needed for deployment automation and configuration tasks. Then there is the problem with the poor IO performance, that I’ve written several posts on, and excessive SSD writes wearing out drives, that have remained unresolved, and no solution seems to be forthcoming. ...

I have been happy with my server rack running my UniFi network equipment and two Windows Server 2016 (W2K16) instances. I use the servers for archiving my media collection and running Hyper-V for all sorts of home projects and work related experiments. But, time moves on, one can never have enough storage, and technology changes. So I set about a path that led to me replacing my W2K16 servers with Unraid. I currently use Adaptec 7805Q and 81605ZQ RAID cards, with a mixture of SSD for caching, SSD RAID1 for boot and VM images, and HDD RAID6 for the large media storage array. The setup has been solid, and although I’ve had both SSD and HDD failures, the hot spares kicked in, and I replaced the failed drives with new hot spares, no data lost. ...

[Update] After using the printer for about two weeks, I returned it to Monoprice for a refund. I would suggest you stay away and look elsewhere, or wait until Monoprice addresses the serious issues; Polar Cloud disconnects while printing, IO timeout error breaks camera function, and the deal breaker is the hangs during printing, with the touch screen unresponsive and the extruder and print bed heater still on. I’ve been looking for a new 3D printer to use at home, and I just installed and configured my new Monoprice Voxel 3D Printer. ...

I’ve had an Ambient Weather WS-1400-IP weather station installed for some time, reporting to Weather Underground. During the fires of previous years, I considered getting an air quality monitor, but I could never find anything worth the installation effort. During this year’s fire season I saw several ads for PurpleAir, advertising that they collaborate with Weather Underground, so I decided to purchase and install a PA-II outdoor sensor. The installation instructions are sparse, and the device is not really what I would call rugged or weatherproof. I would not put money on it surviving outdoors for longer than a year, specifically because of the use of a vanilla Micro-USB power plug that offers no corrosion protection. The unit I received came with a Nest outdoor camera power cable, but unlike the Nest camera that uses a watertight plug, the sensor uses an open USB cable. The instructions do say to point the open USB port downwards, instead I opted to seal it in using clear silicone sealer. ...