LINUX Unplugged - 620: Brent Loves Building Things

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Off-the-shelf didn't cut it, so we built what we needed using open hardware and open source.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMCastamaticCastamatic 11 - with live shows and Podping — With this release, you can now listen to live podcast episodes directly in the app and get instant notifications as soon as a new episode—live or recorded—is available.ESP8266 NodeMCUDHT22/AM2302 Digital Temperature and Humidity Sensor Module5V One Channel Relay Module Relay Switch with OPTO Isolation High Low Level TriggerMarine Boat 3" in-Line Bilge Air Blower DC 12V 130 CFMWolfwhoop PW-D Control Buck Converter 6-24V to 5V 1.5A Step-Down Regulator Module Power Inverter Volt StabilizerTICONN Waterproof Electrical Junction BoxBOJACK 3 Values 130 Pcs Solderless BreadboardESPHome Web - web.esphome.io — Allows you to prepare your device for first use, install new versions and check the device logs directly from your browser.PlatformIO - Your Gateway to Embedded Software Development ExcellencebuildFHSEnv - nixpkgs — Provides a way to build and run FHS-compatible lightweight sandboxes.ESPHome NixOS module: Failure to compile firmware because of DynamicUsersPick: High Tide — Third party unofficial TIDAL music client. Listen to your favorite music from your desktop or mobile Linux device at the highest quality.Pick: Junction — Junction pops up automatically when you open a file or link in another app.Junction on Flathub

Hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris, my name is Wes, and my name is Brent. Hello gentlemen, coming up on the show today, Off the Shelf just didn't cut it, so we built the tool we needed using open hardware and open source. You're going to learn the basics of how to build your own ESP32 project, whether it's for your own rig and RV or home automation system or something like a smart chicken coop. Or maybe you just love hearing about no cloud, no nonsense tech, but we've got something for you this week and then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks and a lot more. So before I go any further, let's say time

appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello Mumble Room! Hey Chris, how's everything? Hello! Hello, it's a smaller quiet listening crew and a larger on-air crew this week. Ah, lovely. Upgraded. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble if you want the details. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale,

tailscale.com slash unplug. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are, protected by Waggon. And if you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, you'll get it for free on 100 devices, three users, no credit card required. And then you get secure remote access

to your production systems, your servers, whatever it might be, super fast. And it's privacy for every individual or every organization. And it has an intuitive, easy to use interface where you can set and manage your privacy and your rules. And it's so quick to get started. You got five minutes,

you're gonna get it working on three systems. They'll build out a flat mesh network called your tail net. And then that tail net persists between all of those machines. Maybe it's your mobile device, it's a couple of VPSs, a VM, container app, you name it. Since I've built this out, and it really changed the way I do networking,

I then deployed it at Jupyter Broadcasting so that with the backend services that are in different VPS data centers, and actually one of them is in an actual data center It's a colo box like they're all communicating on this land It's so powerful but yet safe and private thousands of companies like Instacart hugging face and Duolingo have all switched to tailscale and of course so many never in our audience use It as well. That's right. Go check out tailscale tailscale.com

use it as well. That's right. Go check out tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged. You support the show. You get it for free up to 100 devices and three users. Not a limited time trial. And then you're really going to kick the tires with that.

That's that's the kind of trust they have. Check it out. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Well, we got some really good news for iOS users, which I think we've said that in a while and that is Castamatic, which is one of the pinnacle of the podcasting 2.0 apps. It's just absolutely fabulous as Version 11 shipping with live support. Whoo. Now, why do we love live support so much Wes?

Is it because we're live right now? Yeah, there's that It's a way to be live by just simply putting a couple of lines in an RSS feed. And then your podcast client, if it has support like Cast-O-Matic now, it'll just show up like a regular podcast in the same place you go to listen to us. No stinking Twitch, no stinking YouTube needed,

no X, no big tech involved at all. Whatever streaming platform you want, whatever mode of streaming, video, audio, you just define it in your RSS feed and these clients read it and incorporate it, just like your existing shows, like Wes said. No digging around for links, no switching to another platform,

you just open your podcast app and you tap play. It's so rad. And the podcasts that take advantage of this are standing out from the pack. So Castamatic 11 is already a fantastic iOS podcasting 2.0 app. But to see Castamatic 11 now with live support is so great. I've been waiting for this for a while. You can find it at castamatic.com.

It is free. I don't know if it's open source. I don't think so. But it is a fantastic app. It has iCloud Sync support. It has GapZapper. It has a nice automatic leveler if you have some podcasts that don't pay as much attention to their levels. Smart playlists.

I love it. And I've been waiting forever to get lit support. It's great to see it. Maybe boosted if you give it a try. to get lit support, and it's great to see it. Maybe boost it if you give it a try. Many years ago, I upgraded my RV, AKA Lady Jupiter, AKA JUPES, from a stock power system with a couple of golf batteries

and a cheap inverter to a full zombie apocalypse off-grid capable machine. And ever since then, I've been trying to plug in different Linux components or different devices to try to pull metrics and organize and manage all of this. And I've built up a pretty mean system with one major problem. All that gear can overheat, especially when you need it the most. When the system is producing a lot of power, it also produces a lot of heat. So you can imagine in the summer, that's a big problem.

I've always wanted to address this, but there was not really the right product. I mean, besides trying to figure out how to physically install it and how to vent the system, I also needed a practical way to trigger it, ideally one that doesn't require direct intervention, say while I'm driving, and I wanted something that would reliably trigger a blower,

so I wouldn't have to worry about maybe it's not running or if I don't have internet, it won't start the automation. So I had all these requirements and I figured there was probably an open source angle to this because it uses DC power. It has to be able to work offline with no cloud integration. Ideally it could be integrated into Home Assistant so I can collect metrics and do automations. So I need something that provides data so I can see the difference of when we had it in place

and used and when we're not using it. And since I'm installing it in my home, I want it to have a 10-year lifespan or longer. I don't think the perfect commercial device that's pre-built exists for this, especially when you get into the no-cloud 10-year user space. Yeah, that cuts out a lot of options, I would think. And if I'm putting it literally in my home, like I'm mounting it to the walls

or in the walls, I want it to be open source. I don't want it to be a proprietary piece of software that has like a limited lifespan and that you don't really understand and can fail for unknown reasons at any time that you just, your only option is to replace the entire thing. And if it's a proprietary piece of equipment, it's probably no longer made. Right.

You know, it's hard to get the exact one-to-one replacement. I want something common enough that if in six years, seven years, it dies, I can order a new one on Amazon and have it in two days. That doesn't exist. That just doesn't exist. So, we had to build one. And this is the perfect introduction to ESP devices. They're low cost, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled

microcontrollers produced by, is it Espressif? How do you say their name? I never say it right. I think you're pretty good, Espressif. Yeah, now they're pretty well known in the IoT space. And these things are, when I say affordable, I mean $9 gets you a four pack of these things or something like that off of Amazon.

I mean affordable is ridiculous. Low power consumption, there are three volts, and you can combine them with another open source project called ESPHome, which is now part of Home Assistant, and it gives it a Home Assistant friendly framework that makes it really easy to integrate and start setting up. Yeah, right, you kind of have like one part

which is this microcontrollery ecosystem. You can do stuff like what, Arduino or MicroPython or TAS Modo or all kinds of different options for what you run on there. And then you compare that if you're a Home Assistant user with ESPHome, which makes this like very user friendly layer on top to like manage it and interface between the two. So these little ESP32 devices, they're typically running like WESA, there's a several different

TASMOTO, you know, but they're typically running free RTOS, which is a tiny little real time operating system. You can even operate these things essentially bare metal. But the nice thing about FreeRTOS is it kind of does exactly what we need for this job. It handles task scheduling, memory management, and the interrupts, and it also is aware of the GPIO pins and their layout and all of that.

Just enough of a tiny little operating system that you can then run what you need to like, get on WiFi appropriately and have an API that Home Assistant can talk to, but without having to reinvent the whole world or program it all yourself in C++. And the main chip for these things, it's not much bigger than a quarter. They're really small and they're in all kinds of different pre-built packages as well. Now, did you know that Amazon bought FreeRTOS back in 2017? Vaguely, now I, but I had totally forgotten.

I guess that means either no one paid attention or they haven't done anything super horrible to it since. Yeah, it's still MIT licensed. Okay, great. I mean, it's even used on the Mars Rover. So it's like from ESP32 devices all the way up on Mars. So that's pretty nice. And then like Wes was saying,

you combine that with ESP Home, which is that open source firmware project, and it gives you a simplified way to manage these. Like my YAML configuration, for what we're about to talk about, with spacing and clean formatting and comments, 35 lines, and it's with a lot of spacing and whatnot. I'll put an example link in the show notes.

So you use ESPHome to kind of get you this really simple to configure little device and it's leveraging free RTOS underneath the hood. And they make it maintainable to send over the air updates throughout the device's life cycle. See that's pretty killer, right? So you have to like plug it in to get it flashed the first time.

Yes. But then after that you can just update it over the air. Yes. That's so great. Especially if you have a plug it in to get it flashed the first time. But then after that, you can just update it over the air. That's so great. Especially if you have a bunch of these deployed in your walls or whatever. Yeah, and you can update all of them in one push. It does a build check first, so if the build fails, it won't flip them to production. So there's also a bit of a safety net there. Quite insane.

And you can do things like, oh, I actually wanted to use this or change the temperature sensor sensitivity from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. You can do all of that without having to physically go to the device. You can push the config. It does a build in ESPHome and then sends it all out there and boots the device. Just really nice. And you're all doing it over your LAN. You know?

I mean, better have a good LAN. Yeah, that will. Yeah, yeah. And some RAM. Yeah. But it's all right there in the Home Assistant dashboard these days. You just have to get the add on going. So for our setup, we used an ESP8266 device and a DC relay and a temperature sensor all hanging off of this ESP8266.

And then we used ESP Home working with Home Assistant to configure the temperature sensor, which can trigger the blower fan automatically when the RV power system gets too hot, and then it logs all of it in Home Assistant. Okay, so the ESP is playing both relay for the temperature sensor back to Home Assistant Central, and then it's also playing endpoints, sort of like control, to trigger the relay.

Yes, it triggers the relay that turns the fan on. And so these are just the perfect tools for the job. So a little recap, right? DC powered, everything's DC in this system, offline operation, zero cloud dependency, home assistant integration for monitoring control, data logging and temperature and fan status, and depending on how we build it, which we'll get into,

I think we can get a 10 plus year lifespan out of this. So like I said we had an ESP8266 we picked up a DHT22 temperature sensor and we started a building but we also needed a couple of other things we needed a fan and these ESPs don't just run off of straight 12 volts so we had to get another component as well. A little buck converter they call them. I don't know why they're called that. Someone will eventually write in and tell me. But that converts the 12 volt that is pretty common in cars, but also Chris's RV, and converts

that DC directly to 5 volts, which can power this little ESP and the temperature sensor as well so it does a little bit of I don't know electron magic for us to make it all work in a nice little package. And we also added to our little design here a little fuse in here so you could you know these are things to consider you're gonna need a step-down converter if you're coming for 12 volt or a battery you may want to fuse so just those things are something to know about and yeah you can then you know sort of build to your heart's desire.

And then ultimately you need to be able to get these little ESP devices either plugged into your home assistant or on wifi and then you can start pushing configurations to them. So that's sort of the background. Oh, and one other thing I think you should probably know before you get into the project is these ESPs, like a Raspberry Pi, have GPIO pins on them.

And these, some of them have particular functions. So in our example, our thermostat sensor is plugged into GPIO 14, which is often labeled D5 on the board. And then we have a relay plugged into GPIO 5, which is also called D1. So there's all these pins on here and you just plug stuff into them and then in the YAML configuration you say, on this pin, this is a sensor.

And on this pin, that's a relay. And that's all you have to say. I have to confess that originally when I looked at Raspberry Pis, I saw the little GPIO pins and thought, I'm never ever, ever gonna use those. I know some people will, but like, I'm'm gonna use that on my Raspberry Pi or any other device I don't know. Why do I even need that?

Everything changed this week Yeah, and you know PJ points out and something people should be aware of Some of these pins have special functions, but the ones we used GPIO 14 and GPIO 5 They are not tied to any special boot functions, so they don't output any expected signals at startup. They're really clean, they're good to use for sensors and relays. So some of these general purpose input outputs have specific purposes, you're telling me. And they do things at boot, you need to be aware of it, but generally GPIO 14 and GPIO

5 are safe for this. Lucky numbers. Yeah. So this, for me, and managing all this, was the really easy part because Home Assistant took care of it for me. But Wes, you took another crack at it. Yeah, okay. So I've been doing Home Assistant, but on NixOS, knowing that I'm doing it the hard

and now unsupported way and just figuring, well, let's see what it's like. I'm reserving the option to just run it in a VM or a container later if that seems worth it for what I wanna do with it. But until then, see how far I can get. So for you guys, right, you're running the whole operating system, right? And so you have the add-on store.

And so ESPHome, the software itself, not the integration, but the actual dashboard and management stuff, that's just an add-on. Yeah, for a little bit of context, my home assistant system in the RV is using the Home Assistant Yellow hardware, which is a CM4-based system and has about two gigs of RAM, which can be pushing it when you're trying

to do a bunch of builds for ESPHome. And one of the things you can do is you can go into the configuration for ESPHome's add-on and you can tell it to limit itself to one thread, which because you're using only one thread instead of like four, it uses less RAM, but it takes longer. Just a little bit of context there. So yeah, I'm using it on a CM4-based system.

I imagine this Nix box you're using it on is probably more powerful. I find it interesting because Chris, you're doing the most supported way, and you might be arguably doing the least supported way. I like that difference. So thankfully, ESPHome is packaged in Nix, and it has a NixOS module.

So you can just run it yourself, which is handy if you're trying to do troubleshooting and just want to manually flash something, just a little command you can run. But the module's pretty easy, pretty much just enable equals true. So the main difference in the experience there is that instead of being like another thing that you go to inside the Home Assistant tab, it's like a separate tab for a service running

on a separate port or put it behind a reverse proxy or whatever you want to do. Otherwise basically the same, though as usual with NICs you kind of get a bit more of a look under the hood sometimes, especially if there's something goes wrong, you're troubleshooting, or figuring out how to make it work. And to do some of all of its magic, it turns out ESPHome does want to download some binaries, including some special compilers, to make all that magic work. This is done by something called Platform.io under the hood. So, Nix handles this by using what's called Build FHS environment, which uses Bubblewrap to create a more traditional Linux FHS hierarchy

environment to run that software in. So, ESPHomes and on the Wiser, it's on a weird NixOS file system. Yes. And in particular, the rando binaries it runs to try to compile your build also don't have to deal with that. So, it's a solution really. As a result too, the NixOS module does a good job, you could argue, enabling as much of the system de-hardening stuff, you know, because if something's downloading some rando binaries that's running, maybe you want it to not have to have full write over your system or whatever.

Yeah, definitely, right. But that caused me a little bit of an issue. I don't know if there's something that changed or just some details in the module that needs to get worked out, but by default it was writing to like var lib esp home, but was set up to use like private users for security and dynamic users.

And basically that meant that when it was running, systemd does some bind mounts and it was adding the no exec flag. So everything was working except I was getting permission denied trying to actually run the compiler to compile. It was essentially being overly cautious and saying you don't want to execute this. Yes. And so I figured out pretty quick I could just tell platform.io to use slash temp for

all of the stuff and then that worked. And then I did a little more work for it. And I was able to modify the systemd file. We'll see, maybe I'll try to submit this or see what other people think. But basically have a separate cache directory, which is the thing systemd supports for a service. You can say like, hey, make a slash var slash cache

just for this service. So use that for all the platform.io stuff. So unlike with slash temp, it won't get cleared at boot, but it is in a place because it can be redownloaded that, you know, system D knows that it can get cleared if needed. And then you can add something called exec paths, which is an option to basically tell system D

only allow to exec things from these paths, but do allow those paths. So then I tell it like, you know, go use the slash bin from the package to run all the ESP home bits and allow the cache that I've just set up. And then after that, it pretty much just worked. Wow.

Yeah, so then I was able to get another 8266 thing that... Flashed. Producer Jeff kindly gave me, yeah, got it flashed, worked just fine. So you had a lot more initial setup to get it working, but you came away with a lot clearer understanding of how it works under the hood. This is true.

And now you have that config forever, so you could always reproduce this. Now, if you really want it easy, you don't need Home Assistant, you don't have to set it up like Wes did. You can actually go to web.esphome.io and do some of the initial setup right there in your web browser.

The catch is it has to be Chrome because they take advantage of some serial port API ESPHome.io and do some of the initial setup right there in your web browser, the catch is it has to be Chrome because they take advantage of some serial port API stuff. Right. And you do need to be in the dial-out group and have the permissions to access the USB device and all of that. But if you have all of those prerequisites checked off, you can get these things started and dump a YAML config on there from just their hosted website at web.esphome.io, and everything runs 100% in the browser locally.

That's pretty great, because then all you need, I mean, if you do want to even still do Home Assistant, right, you just have to have the integration on that side and you can add the devices. Turns out even hardware requires a browser. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, password.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password dot com slash unplugged. It's all lowercase.

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Chris and I looked at each other and we tried to divvy up the work. And Chris was going to do the software, which as you can hear was nice and simple. And then I was going to get started on the hardware. Well, it turns out that's a bit more of a challenge, but we've got a good team. Producer Jeff sent us a bunch of consults and diagrams. And well, years ago, he even taught us about these devices. So we took out a big box filled with devices from what? 2023 is the last time we kind of dove into this project box.

And we're like, oh yeah, we've done this before. It's not that hard. It'll just take us like, what an hour to put things together and we'll put ESB home together and all the configs and we'll just have it up and running by noon. And that should be pretty easy. I thought we'd get lunch and then we'd probably switch gears'll just have it up and running by noon. Yeah. And that should be pretty easy. I thought we'd get lunch and then we'd probably switch gears to a separate project around

2pm. Yeah. But then the first part was just figuring out where to get power from. Yeah. Right? You need power for all these devices so we were going to get a little bit of power. Well if we're going to hook up a fan we need power. So the first thing we're doing before we screw anything into the wall or run any ducts is

making sure we have a place We can tap power into and we need 12 volts because it's a 12 volt fan brand. I Think we did that by design, right? Yeah. Yeah, the only problem is to add the fan I need to turn the light off, but I'm using the light to see what I'm doing we're gonna steal 12 volts from a 12 volt light that's in the storage bay and And tap off of that, which we've done before. Jeff's done that successfully. But yeah, then we lose light. Yeah.

Maybe if you squint hard. I wish the lighting was our biggest challenge. I'm confused. Why didn't Brent have his headlamp on? I know, right? This was pre-headlamp deployment and it did encourage me to deploy headlamp. He always has it on him, of course. But what really slowed us down, I think, is what kind of snags you up on all kinds of new projects

where you're not familiar with the little details. All the little parts, all the little EDO synchrocyzes of the ecosystem. The stuff that looks good at a high level plan, and then you're like, oh, wait. Like, we got an ESP board. We thought we were being so clever, because we got an ESP board originally

that had the ESP and two relays on it. And so like a couple of hotshots, we figured we just supply five volt voltage to this ESP and everything's gonna work. And instead, when we powered it up, it did like this crazy relay dance and click, click, click, click, click, click, and all the light started flashing, like clearly.

And so we had to realize like, oh no, we have to provide two separate types of power. There's there's a five volt system on this same board. And this thing's smaller than a Raspberry Pi. And then there's like a whole other like three volt or 12 volt depends on the equipment on this thing. And we didn't realize that could even be a possibility. Or, you know, for example, we'd ordered a lot of these parts in 2023, like Branson. So we didn't really know what all we had,

so we were kind of making it work with what we did have and nothing was really meant to go together, the wire sizes aren't the same, the gauges aren't right. Like, layer one can be a real turd when you're just trying to get started. You know, if this is something we did every weekend, I think we would have busted this out by noon. Sometimes things just take longer than you expected.

You know, I couldn't tell you. We got ourselves this fancy ESP and maybe that wasn't the right way to go. So we went and got ourselves one of our classics that we had and I plugged it in and it wasn't working. I plugged in the next one, it wasn't working. Four ESPs later, none of them were working. I thought, okay, maybe it's something wrong with the groups I'm in. Turns out I needed to be in dial-out.

Kept digging around trying to figure out, why can't my Bluefin system detect this ESP over USB? Bad USB cable. Took me way too long to figure out bad USB cable. It's always layer one, Chris. I know. So once I got the right USB cable, we got it built. We have ESP home on there. It's always layer one, Chris. I know. So once I got the right USB cable, we got it built, we have ESP home on there, it's configured on our Wi-Fi, and we have

pre-configured the GPIO pins. Jeff gave me an example config I could basically just copy and modify to my needs. So this guy is ready and you've been soldering, which I know you love. Uh, I think I love soldering as much as I love building computers. I hate building PCs. And you've soldered, I guess this is kind of a temporary power thing, so we can kind of put all this together and test to make sure we have it all working. Yeah, we had a power issue earlier this morning, might have been one of the cables you just mentioned,

but we've been trying to power this board with a variety of power sources with no luck, so I'm trying yet another wreck around, and it involves lots of soldering. But it feels like once we get that bit done, then it's kind of just connecting all the pieces and wiring things up. But I thought this would be the easy part. So we'll see. Now if you're new to some of this, like we were, I think Brent, you'd agree having a breadboard where you can prototype some of this is really handy.

Yeah, that was really nice because you end up with this basically, I don't know, small circuit that you can just plug things into, provide power to the entire board, and then just very visually and in an organized way access those GPIO pins that you were mentioning. Yeah, because the 80s, whatever it is, sits right in the breadboard, just pops right in. Yeah, the whole ESP development board, you can just kind of work its way into this development, or the breadboard, which just does a bunch of electrical connections, and then plug a bunch of other things to it.

But by the end of it, it was a bit of a spaghetti mess of me trying to just really power this thing so you could see it on the Wi-Fi. What kind of adds to this spaghetti mess is these all need to be on the same common ground. That's a really important aspect for this functioning properly. So you end up with wires kind of going everywhere. I learned that the hard way.

Yeah, the relay that we're using to try to trigger this fan that's going to cool the battery bay, that needs to share a ground with things like the temperature sensor and also, well, all the power sources that you have and all of that. So everything needs to all be in a nice cohesive connection. And we, of course. Sometimes it's quite the jump from what the circuit diagram looks like to the implementation.

Yeah, especially the wiring, original wiring diagram. But it was nice to prototype it and sort of validate it that way. So we kind of had an idea, we were moving in the right direction and it was time to make sure that, you know, we could actually make some of these temporary connections a little less temporary and take them off the breadboard

and actually plug them in in a way that we can really use for a bit. But time was just not our friend this day. All day long, we were constantly running against the clock and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. You know, from like screws falling out of stuff to we go to plug in a cable and the end falls off. Just a lot of cheap parts. Temperature sensor, one of of them was defective the first one we used just by chance

So you one of I think one of the reasons they they all all this stuff comes in kits like when you buy the temperature sensor You get like five of them. It's because I almost always one of them is bad At least that's been our that was our experience this day and some of it had been sitting around for a long time But it was all still wrapped in the packaging in you know, the static bag and all of it had been sitting around for a long time, but it was all still wrapped in the packaging, in the static bag and all of that. But Brentley worked steadily, his hands moving fast, the smoke from the solder, filling the RV and getting sucked out by the Fantastic fan all night long. And I kept tweaking the ESP home config, it was great.

PJ would like, all right, I'll do a test build, and he did a test setup too, and he's like, okay, I validated the build works. Ironically, it failed for him because he had a bad relay So it really kind of started to come together and it was time to really take it down to the actual power bay Hook it all up and see if once triggered it works. Well one bad sensor one bad wire and A bad USB cable later and a bunch of soldering we have the first test wired up. I mean like this looks like it should be it. Everything's in place. He got

everything hooked up to the 12 volts. So once the ESP boots I should be able to trigger the fan from Home Assistant. I hope so. Yeah me too man. It's been a long day. It's 9 p.m. right now. I've learned a lot today. Yeah. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, you become a better solder. Your soldering skills have improved, so. I'll use it next year.

There's that. Yeah, next year? We're probably not done soldering. Ah. But shall we try it? Yep, it looks like it's online. Should I hit it? Okay, here we go.

Survey says. Survey says Survey says oh, oh it did work. It's just my home assistant app was oh, it's just the home assistant app All right, let's try it again Oh, there it goes! It just took off. It worked! It blew itself off. It's powerful. It moves a lot of air. It worked really well, I would say. Yeah, it's designed for a bilge of a boat. So it moves air.

Now, we're doing a couple of things to actually try to make this thing last 10 years. You know, besides putting a fuse of things to actually try to make this thing last 10 years You know besides putting a fuse on it to help protect it. We're gonna put it in right now It's not in this box, but that's we're doing tomorrow is Installing a waterproof junction box for this thing. We're just gonna put all the components in there it's got like a little pegboard on the back so you can peg stuff to it and then ultimately Build in a bypass system as well. That's probably like, I guess, phase two,

is build a bypass system, and either like, buy a switch on this junction box, or just buy cords that I can move. So if there for some reason was a failure, I could still go manually activate the fan. Yeah, okay, that sounds smart. Yeah, and it's clean, and you know, as long as you get the wiring done,

and you know, rent's done, what do you call that heat wrapping that you did? Oh, it's shrink wrap, and we got thankfully some really nice stuff that shrinks. I think it's like three times its size. And also has adhesive on these. That's the stuff I would totally recommend. Yeah, it's a kit on Amazon. Maybe we can find it, try to put a link in the notes.

It's great, it's great, it's clean, it holds it all together, because we're trying to build this to also handle road vibration and you know, high temperatures and whatnot. But this one ESP device has the relay and the temperature sensor, which also is a humidity sensor. And you could inside the ESP config trigger everything using the ESP directly. So when the fan sensor when the temperature sensor reads 80 degrees, you know, turn on the switch.

Sure, you don't have it all local brain. You totally could. And that would be definitely something to consider. It's the most probably reliable way to run this. So I'm going to do the right thing and I'm not going to do that. And I'm going to use Home Assistant to automate this. And the reason why is because I already have 30 other systems that are automated and managed with home assistant.

So to keep it consistent with what it sort of has as a standard, I'm gonna do it that way. And so I'll build what'll essentially be a little dashboard or can already have one with the different temperatures on it and you just go to that dashboard and you set the temperature you want and that fan will run until it reaches that temperature. Welcome to fan control central. Yeah, that temperature. Ooh, welcome to Fan Control Central.

Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And I'm feeling pretty good, like it's gonna last. We already have other ESP devices in the walls that have been working great for years. What do you think the approximate build cost was? Great question, that is a good question. Maybe not including, you know, you don't have to include all of the extra solder

and equipment or whatever, but. So we had to buy the fan and a couple of vents. The fans like 20 bucks. The vents are like- Fence are five each or so, something like that. And then, you know, a pack of ESPs is about nine bucks. Relay? Relay's a few bucks. Four bucks, five bucks. So it's pretty, pretty cheap. And then con, you know, a little conduit for the fan. You know, it's pretty cheap. And then a little conduit for the fan.

You know, it's nothing. We ended up using the Pinecel, which is the really nice open hardware soldering pencil that we've been using for a couple years. Also recommended by our dear community. And Jeff, thank you for sending this one along. It's really handy because it's powered off of USB-C. Oh, so great.

And we had a high wattage portable battery that's small, but high wattage, so Brent was able to just do that. And just he could take it with him wherever he needed to go. So that was really great. I would also say part of the cost just goes towards having the accessories, so some wiring that's appropriate, having heat shrink, having this little breadboard. You don't absolutely need it, but it sure does help.

Do you think you could have built a 10 year device that lasts without soldering? With clip connect, I just don't think so. I mean, if it wasn't maybe in a moving vehicle. Yeah, I think you'd probably take a bit of a different route. Like, there are cables specifically made to slip over the GPIO pins. You could maybe glue those into place,

or I know you can use nail polish to waterproof certain things. And that might keep things in place. But really, soldering was one of the best ways that we could. For instance, the ESP were powering with a USB cable that I created with this buck converter built into the cable. I made my own like super high fancy cable. Apple should hire me at this point.

It's pretty slick. And I was able to, because of soldering and like some of these wires are teeny tiny, I was able to make a cable that actually looks really quite clean and small and slick and waterproof and all of this So in that way, I don't think I could have made that cable right connectors in the same way Sort of depends on what your quality threshold is here. Yeah, as you know mine tends to be maybe a little high Well, I mean how proud would you be if this thing last, you know, twelve years or something like that's a pretty big Like we come back to this in the decade and that thing still in use Well, I think especially for you Chris like a device that you end up mounting in the guts of your RV

You don't look at it every day You're not right like you don't have an eye on oh this thing's starting to come apart or oh There's a little bit of corrosion here or something like that So it is though one of the nice things about home assistant You do know if it's online, when it's last been working, so you do get some data, but you're right, like I'm not eyes on it, I'm not checking it every day. Yeah, exactly.

I also think, you know, these devices can apply to more than just this 12-volt RV situation. That's the unlock. And that's the thing, I think the big takeaway, that if you wrap your head around what we've talked about today, anything that's really on a switch, you can automate with an ESP and a relay. And it's a massive unlock, and it's stuff that you can actually take a stab at doing

because you're not gonna get rugged in three years when the cloud service shuts down. Yes, commodity hardware and open source software. And the folks behind ESP Home, well that's the Home Assistant Foundation. There's a foundation model there to make sure that it's vendor neutral and all of that. It's here for the long haul. I literally have it installed in walls.

And it works. It is reliable as any smart device I've ever had. You just need to have Wi-Fi. It reminds me of the Raspberry Pi in the sense that it has a massive community of people building all sorts of things around it. I think, really, we're late to the party in this particular one. Yeah, oh, there's huge.

And so many devices. Yeah, so anything you're hoping to do with it has probably been done already. And you can find some assistance, some support, some examples of this happening. People are 3D printing their own cases. They're making their own PCBs around these platforms. So it's a very rich ecosystem.

And the beautiful thing about the little tiny device that you and I made, Chris, which is probably the reason we wanted to spend, I don't know, this many hours on pulling our hair out to build the thing. It's going to be like, yeah, three days of work all said and done. We thought it'd be an afternoon of work or a morning, but yeah. It reminds me so much though of when I first was learning Linux is like, oh, there's all these systems that I don't quite understand.

You get little snippets of like how it all and then you put together your first project and it works. Yeah. And now that knowledge carries forward to build on top of. And well, for us, this little ESP plus relay is like, OK, you're using it in your RV with 12 volt power, but I can install this thing in my cabin with 120 volt power. These relays also support up to 240. So in Europe, they can use it. So now we've got the knowledge, and hopefully we're

a bit faster next time, to build a bunch of these and use them in any context that we find ourselves in, whether it's outdoors or indoors or anywhere. So it's this massive unlock, or at least that's what I'm telling myself, to justify the time we put into it. Unraid.net slash unplug. Go over there, support the show, and check out Unraid.

Unleash your hardware. Unraid's a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system built on top of modern Linux with a modern kernel in there that gives you control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your data and your applications. You'll hear us talk about things like Home Assistant or Jellyfin, or some of the LLM apps that are a lot of fun. You can spin these up in just seconds on top of Unraid.

Additionally, if you have mismatched disks, Unraid will help you manage all of that. They have some of the best virtualization support out there, making it easy to pass through hardware or share graphics cards amongst multiple virtual machines. And if you're getting into ZFS or you've already got ZFS, well, Unraid has something for you. And they really kicked things up recently in Unraid 7.1

if you haven't taken a look. They make it possible now to support and import the existing pools on your Ubuntu system or maybe your Proxmox box or a free NAS box. You want to step it up to something a little classier and more powerful. You can now just import it. Boom. Right into Unraid. It's such an awesome move and feature. But beyond that, they've also just taken the ZFS level

support all the way there. They've got a bunch of file system support, but very impressed to see how they've completed that circle in Unraid 7.1. Also in there now is wireless networking support. So if you're like me at home, I can't run ethernet. So everything has to be on Wi-Fi or I suppose Zigbee or Z-Wave or something.

So having out of the box, WIFI support makes that a lot nicer. Also I've been playing around with reusable VM templates. So think about this system. Just you get it working. You like it a lot. That's a template now. And now you can reuse that over and over again. Lots of very awesome features.

But think as a longtime Linux user, the thing I appreciates the most is that they truly do follow Linux development. They watch that driver space, they watch the file system space, and they incorporate it intelligently and safely into unraid. They are really taking an active role in that position, and they're not falling behind and forgetting about, you know, updating the kernel and that kind of stuff. Like they make sure they track that.

When they ship a new version of Unraid, you get Linux features that have been tested, tried, and the ones you want for this kind of system. That's part of what I really like about it. And I think that's why it's awesome they actually have a monetization strategy for Unraid. That's what's made this possible for all these years. So get started now.

Go to unraid.net slash unplugged. See how far your imagination and your server can go while you're supporting the show. possible for all these years. So get started now. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged. See how far your imagination and your server can go while you're supporting the show. You get a free 30 day trial, no credit card required. Kick the tires. See what we're talking about. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Well, if you're ahead of us on the ESP journey, maybe ride in, boost in, let us know what crazy or super useful things you've built. I know we're all excited about, you know,

where we can take this. And as usual, our audience is light years ahead. Now, it's just a little reminder that next week, well, Chris is finally coming to Canada to pay me a visit. We're gonna be taking the van from the JB Studio that we've been working on for, oof, feels like two months now. And also Lady Joop, so it's going to be a bit of a road trip. That means we will not be live next week for Linux Unplugged,

but there will be a regular episode coming as usual. And now it is time for the boost. And we start with our baller booster, who comes in as TuiTickler with 63,333 sets. Coming in hot with the boost! I'm just saying, your bootleg membership needs a try before you buy option. Like when Costco gives you a bite-size hot dog and a slice and then suddenly you're buying 48 packs. That's so true of Costco.

You guys make a reference. Now let me snack on it. Delicious. I am very, very proud of the bootleg. I actually think the bootleg should be heard by more, more listeners're gonna get your wish, Tooey Tickler. Stay tuned, perhaps sooner than you expect you're gonna get to hear some of the bootleg stuff. Thank you for being our baller, it's nice to hear from you and your username's hilarious. Wine Eagle Boosin with 22,272 cents. This old duck still got it.

Thank you for Browse. Oh yeah. I was able to authorize Lear to sync Gmail with Not Much, plus Eric and Emacs and Neomut support. Wow. Wow. All of my headless nicks, them NAS that required going through an OAuth screen on a browser

with JS. Whoa. This is the way. That is an impressive setup, Wine Eagle. So how many points is that? The things people are willing to do is pretty impressive. That's quite the... Although fun, I imagine.

Thank you for telling us. Wow. That's pretty great. Damn. Thank you for the update. That's good to hear. Keep them coming. Well, Jordan Bravo boosted in a row of ducks.

I know the 2AEE challenge has ended, but I have a recommendation. Systemctl-2EE is a 2EE for SystemD, as the name suggests. It is, of course, written in Rust and available in Nix packages. Hey! Yeah, this one also, I think, that's sticking with me on the challenge. I want to say I hope the TUI Challenge continues without us.

You could be doing it right now and then sending us updates. It's something we'd love to hear people check in on. Even though we're done with it, you don't have to be. Just listen to the episodes and follow along. You're at the Linux TUI, am I right? Yeah, that's, yeah, I think so. Magnolia Mayhem's back with 7,777 sats. Man, I wish I could have taken part in the TUI challenge.

I've been coordinating with a bunch of activists and need my laptop as usable as possible, such as the nature of being politically active in Mississippi. That said, I hope you'll accept a late submission one day. I really enjoyed the BSD challenge and I'm still running free BSD on an FX8350 server and on a VPS to this day. So do I get bonus points for a TUI on BSD on an FX 8350 server and on a VPS to this day. So do I get bonus points for a TUI on BSD? I'm gonna say yes. Yeah I'm down with that. BS TUI. Yeah yeah. Oh we never got the veggie dog. Brent will you follow up on that? Yeah I could do that. Thank you. 4 to do boosts in with 4,200 sets. Sounds like you guys found some of

my faves. I don't know how I ever lived without Helix, Yazzie, and Zelizh. I definitely appreciate these for their no-hassle power right out of the box. Ranger and NNN are my runner-ups for file management, though. Micro is of course another great text editor with more standard key bindings. And I'll be checking out Jellyfin 2e right now. It looks like a new staple and reminds me of Mock MOC, which is my go-to simple 2e music player. I tried Mock. Yeah, yeah, I liked Mock.

Thank you for the value. Really appreciate that. Nice to hear from you. 40 Dukes! Dukes. Dukes, dukes. Well, Jan Holbo sent in another 40 Dukes sets. Here is from the future boost.

Oooh, cool. I'm trying to catch up on the library and just listen to self-hosted 150. I'm looking forward to getting the occasional self-hosted story in Linux Unplugged. Welcome to this week's content. Question for you, you talked about using NixOS instead of Docker. Well, does NixOS support virtual IP addresses for different apps, say Image, Nextcloud, Notify, Smokeping, etc. on the very same host? Boost is also a postcode boost.

In this case, divide the boost with two. And hint, here lives an ever young lady with a tail. What? Right, you're on that hint. You're my new guide. It's a zip code? I don't see it. You see it in there?

I am slow on these. What's my problem? Do you see it, Wes? Well, you take maybe the boost and divide it by two, I think, and you get some crazy number. Oh, there it is! Let's see here. How? Jeez. I know, it's kind of sharp. It's huge. I think can you get some crazy? Oh, there it is. Let's see here. How? Jeez.

I know, it's kind of sharp. It's huge. I don't know why I polish it. Don't tape all these extra extensions onto it. Yeah, well, you know, Mars, the moon, they're relevant. We never even go to Mexico. Why do you have Mexico on here? Oh, oh, I see.

Oh, Wes. You find it. I'm looking at you. Why don't you have the other one for the other section? I know that that's why I need a second thing. A six signs is crazy. Yeah, well, it's a higher dimensional object is the thing. Is that a laser? Yeah, it's weird that he used all this tech for the thing. Is that a laser? Yeah it's weird that he used all this tech for the map. Like we could have used this for all sorts of stuff. Here we are soldering and he's got this like

eight-dimensional cube map. Well I'm trying to break down the the hint here. So the hint is here lives an ever young lady with a tail. And well, our dear friend AI, in some case, thinks maybe it means a mermaid? That could be a thing. Yeah, okay, so then my guess is somewhere near D.Y. in New South Wales, Australia, where I guess maybe as Brent is saying,

there is a well-known mermaid statue. Really? Yes, zip code is a better deal. Australia boost, I love it. If so. I hope that's true, that's pretty neat. Okay. Well, True Grits is thank you for the boost and thank you for a zip code, Math. True Grits is here with 5000 sets. Oh my god, this drawer is filled with Froot Loops!

Regarding the Graffino-S store in the members feed, with them not getting the OEM device tree files, I wonder if this could be a place for collaboration between ROM projects, since I doubt the problem is going to be unique to Graphene OS. You wonder, perhaps they will have to form some sort of alliance. They seem like they like to do their own thing though. So that's going to be a tricky one. But put it out there in the universe, True Grits, and maybe it'll come true.

Because they need friends right now. I like your energy. Tenmoose comes in with a RoboDux. First time booster, long time listener. Yes! Loving the Fountain app. Thank you for going through the setup and getting the sats. It's been a minute, I think, since we heard from a newbie.

Well done, Tenmoose. Oh, and we get a server report. I'm running Red Hat home server on an individual developer license with cockpit to manage my containers and VMs. Neat. Yes, yes, yes. All right, I'm gonna make that as a vote for the Red Hat content right there.

Yeah, there is another one down in the, if we wanna pull up one from the thanks from ForwardHumor voting for OpenShift coverage, so. All right, thank you, ForwardHumor. Hey, did we in the up one from the thanks from ForwardHumor voting for OpenShift coverage, so. All right, thank you ForwardHumor. Hey, did we in the last boost answer the question about NixOS and various IPs? Oh no, we moved right on because we got distracted.

Well, that map is flashy. Yeah, it depends exactly what you're wanting to do. I don't think there's generally, I mean, like some, if you add more IPs to your system and the services support listening on a specific address, then you could do it that way. But there's no NixOS support out of the box for like the Docker style networking. You can do whatever you want on top in terms of, you know, system D services, modifying the setup.

I've made a sort of copy of that for per service network namespaces. a sort of copy of that for per service network namespaces. So you could try that too. But no, there's not an exact copy of like each service automatically lives in a network namespace with its own IP address. But I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're asking. So maybe boost back in and let us know. Thank you everybody who does boost in.

Of course you can be a member and support the show's production directly. You set that on autopilot at linuxunplug.com slash membership and you get the bootleg and you get the ad free as a thank you and it really means a lot. But then we also have this option to support each individual production. It's your vote on how the show was,

how the episode content was, what you thought of it and it's a way to give back if you got value from this particular episode. And you heard it there from Old Moose. One of the best ways to do it is Fountain FM, because they host everything for you. They get it really simple to set up and they integrate with strike, which is available in more and more countries. It's a great company.

There's lots of paths you can take, including totally self-hosted options because it's all an open source peer to peer network. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. We had 27 of you. Not bad. You know, we see a little more, but we had 27 streaming sets. You stack 26,907 sats. When you combine that with our boosters, we had a total of 140, 246 sats.

Maybe not our strongest episode ever, but we really do appreciate any of the support we do get. And if you got some value from this episode, you can send it right back to us in a way that you think keeps us going. And your contribution not only goes to the show, it goes to editor Drew, it goes to the developer of the app you're using,

and a little bit goes to the podcast index. It's a great way to go. And I remembered, there's also built in NixOS containers you can do with systemd nspawn for another way to do that. I just, in case my answer was turning you off for Nix ask too much. You do need to focus. I gotta be thorough.

You gotta focus. There's a flow here. We're doing the thing now. You both did it. We're doing the thing. All right? We got a thing and we're doing it. All right?

But it is good to know. Thank you, everybody. Now, this pic is one that I've just been using the crap out of all week, so I had to mention it on the show, and I wasn't sure if you two had seen it yet. So I'm really hoping I'm introducing it to you for the first time. It's called Hi Tide.

And it is a third party, unofficial title music client that's native on Linux. It works on mobile or your desktop. It's nice, it's high quality. It's technically a GNOME app, works fantastic on Plasma, even the media keys, supports the highest quality setting. Wow.

Yeah, not affiliated with Tidal at all, but it's fantastic, I believe it's GPL3 as well. So it's called HiTide, and it brings Tidal to a native app on Linux, and I love it. So, check it out if you're a title user. It's a Python project, neat. Now, I know not all of you are, you know, title users, so I wanted to do something for those of you who are like,

Chris, come on, I'm an Apple Music listener. Well, I wanted to remind you, they had a release not too long ago about an app that is one of my solid daily go-tos on all my systems. And if I don't have this, I never know what's going to happen when I click a link. It's called Junction and it's a browser chooser. It works again. Great on Plasma or Gnome. It's GPL three. And what it basically does is become your default browser.

So you click a link and say your chat app of choice instead of just launching the browser. And I have one of these chat apps. It doesn't matter what my default browser is. If's not junction. It just always opens things in Chrome I don't know why but if I put junction in there, I then get a chooser screen and I can choose Firefox or I can I actually have ridiculous like four browsers installed for various reasons And I can launch that link in any of them right there So I get a little chooser screen before the browser launches and then it sends it to the correct browser. I get to pick and I get to pick per link, which I really like.

So it's called Junction. I've talked about it before on the show. I know that, but I'm bringing it up again because I use it every day on my systems since I talked about it on the show. And that's been years ago. So it just definitely every now and then an app is so dang good. It deserves another mention Junction. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. I love it high tide and Junction totally different areas. Whoa, but a couple ones I love

Very good and both GPL 3. I'm glad to hear you're still using junction It's it's clearly stuck stuck with you over the years if I could have one feature change. It would be that it So it doesn't necessarily open under where your mouse cursor's at. So I'll click a link, and then, you know, I'm quick like a ninja, I'll move the cursor to the screen I know the browser's gonna be at, because I have K-win rules like a gentleman,

and then Junction will open up on the monitor where I click the link instead of under the mouse where I'm at now, and. Now you gotta go move the mouse all the way back. I gotta go back, yeah, I gotta go back. And I gotta click it, and then I gotta go back. And so I would love it if it just spawned the junction window wherever your mouse cursor was at.

There may be a technical limitation there. I think I have another feature request just imagining that one. It would be cool if you could click a link and get this window as you say, but then have like short keys for each browser. So maybe if you might one, you get, you know, the browser in the first place.

Maybe, I don't know. But I'll tell you what else it has. It has an abort, like an X. You click the X, which is just a teeny little thing down in the corner. It doesn't open any browser. Oh, it's like an oops. Yeah, no, I didn't mean to click that.

Or like I clicked it twice because my finger's dumb or something. Ooh, it says keyboard navigation. Yeah, I thought so. I thought so, I had a feeling. Yeah, I had a feeling. It's great or something. And it says keyboard navigation. Yeah, I thought so. I had a feeling. Yeah, I had a feeling. It's great.

Great app. Really appreciate that developer. So go check them out. Links are at linuxunplugged.com slash zero six two zero. We also would love you to boost in or write us and tell us about your ESP based projects and tell us what you've been doing. Keep an eye on that calendar

because it is the summer travel schedule. So there be, like Wes mentioned, no live episode next week but we'll have a regular release for you. Oh, Brent mentioned it? One of us. I don't know. Whoever I told to mention it. Delegate A. Delegate B actually. The person I delegated that to said it so I'm just reminding you. We're a little fried. It's been a couple of days of projects, okay? And you know, let me tell you, when you know you got a show and you wanna get it working by the show,

that is a real motivator. I'm very impressed with all of your handy work this week. It is working. Yes, it is. And which is great because we're going on that summer road trip and things are about to get hot. All right, details about our mumble room, our matrix, all of that, that's over at LinuxUnplugged.com. You go over there, you get that info, you can figure it out.

Of course, you can also join our Matrix chat, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash matrix. We got a general chat and a couple of dedicated detailed over done. I don't know, there's too many of them, but there's log chat rooms and there's lup chatrooms and there's unplug chatrooms. There's lots of chatrooms. And you can find them on our Matrix server. And then last but not least, you can get the details of when we're live or when we're not live at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. It will be out either way, usually Sunday evening, Monday morning, so you don't really have to overthink it. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So Thanks for watching!