Articles

One day I got fed up with my solder spool rolling around all the time so I designed this simple spool holder in Fusion360 and 3D printed it.

Web applications commonly require a user database and the management logic for it. Having to build such software infrastructure for each individual app would be time consuming so I designed a general-purpose user management microservice that can be easily integrated in a project.

With the user management and group management microservices, users and their groups can be easily queried through HTTP requests. However, the GUI that the user interacts with must also be properly designed so as to provide an optimal UX. To facilitate the query of users via the GUI, I designed a group and user picker component for Vue.js that can be easily installed using NPM.

Wifi controlled smart light bulbs can now be purchased from less than USD 10. However, those can often only be used by a specific application provided by the vendor and can involve exchanging data with a third party server. I wanted a solution to use my own software while benefiting from the cheap hardware so I replaced the wifi module of a a cheap Wifi light bulb my own electronics.

I recently started using Grafana to visualize my apartment data. Although I can easily open a browser tab to view the dashboard I created, I wanted to have a standalone display dedicated to the task that I could put on a shelf of my living room.

Compared to other countries, Japan did not enforce a strict lockdown on its population during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, most bars and restaurants continued their operations as usual. However, in order to prevent the spread of the virus as much as possible, the staff of my local pub printed out signs asking customers to not leave their table without wearing a mask.

IP cameras are cheaper than ever and with the ESP32-CAM boards it is now possible to stream video for less than USD 10. However, IP cameras are commonly either only accessible from within their network, or use servers from third party companies to allow users to see the video feed from anywhere in the world. As both scenarios are inconvenient, I decided to create a camera viewer application that can proxy the video feed to a web interface.

Mosquitto is usually the first candidate to come to mind when looking for an MQTT broker. However, by default, Mosquitto manages users using a password file. This makes it difficult to easily add or remove users, especially when the broker is deployed in Kubernetes.

As a graph database Neo4J is a great choice to manage highly relational data. On the other side, a great number of applications feature at least some form of user management system. With Neo4J, those users can be store as nodes and connected to other items via relationships. A typical example would be a blog, where both articles and users are individual nodes while authorships are represented by a relationship.

Modules like the Wemos D1 mini are a relatively cheap and easy way to integrate an ESP8266 in a project. However, one would sometimes require to have more freedom over the electronics, especially when it comes to PCB layout. For this purpose, the ESP8266 can be used in a form factor closer to its raw form, the ESP12-F module.