A year ago I published an article about a very simple Vibration Logger using an Arduino Uno, an SD card and an accelerometer. Recently, the need to measure vibration came up again, but this time I wanted something better. A device that will let me monitor the readings from anywhere without the need to go … Read more
Recently I have had to monitor the operation of a system of pumps over a period of a few days. Monitoring in person would be a waste of time and would be a pain to do at night. The operation state of the pumps can be determined by the vibration of the system. When the … Read more
Lately I am spending a lot of time working on Fochica. Fochica is a system that alerts parents if they unknowingly leave a child in a car. The Fochica device is Arduino-based, installed in a vehicle and communicates with the parents’ smartphones via Bluetooth. Fochica is a finalist in the Hackaday Prize 2017 competition and … Read more
In the past year or so I have been closely following and partially involved in the Virtual Reality space. Interesting things are happening in the VR space since about 2012, when Oculus and Palmer Lucky brought in the consumer VR revolution in the form of DK1. A short summary for those, who have not been … Read more
I am in the process of setting up a home storage server that will rely heavily on over-provisioning. You can read more about my previous VMware – FreeNAS – ZFS experiences in other articles. In this article I will conduct several experiments showing how available disk space fluctuates at various layers in the system. This … Read more
My main tech project in the last few month has been an all-in-one home lab. The lab is a high-end PC running a hypervisor, which hosts VMs and provides a flexible infrastructure for experiments. One of the main components of such a setup is a storage VM that provides storage to other VMs, while giving … Read more
A year ago I had an unfortunate accident, in which I dropped a barely used 2TB WD Green drive. It fell from about 30cm height onto a hard surface, creating a noticeable dent on the outside. It stopped working on the spot, making unusual sounds and cycling down instead of operating normally. On the one … Read more