Articles

A company I worked for had a coffee machine for which employees could purchase coffee. However, the payment was done by putting coins in a jar. Not only did this present the obvious risk of theft, this system was also impractical for people not carrying spare change at all time. I decided to solve this issue by designing this cashless payment system.

A Node.js application which stores data from IoT devices sent over MQTT into an InfluxDB time-series database. It allows the management of multiple data sources into a MongoDB database.

I've been using&nbsp;<a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Home Assistant</a>&nbsp;to control my home IoT devices for a while. Although it fulfills all my needs, I wanted to make my own system so as to get a fully customized smart home control panel and learn how to build such an application in the process.

The other day, I found myself putting on some weight. This rather surprised me as I thought I was having a healthy diet and exercised almost daily. To identify the root of the problem, I decided to start measuring my calorie intake as well as the macronutrients that constitute said intake.

More often than not, web applications require restrictions regarding who can access the content that they serve. This involves an user management and authentication system, which, if designed inappropriately, can lead to security concerns. However, the development of such system can be time consuming, especially if done repeatedly for multiple applications.

Many companies rely on spreadsheets to keep track of their fixed assets. However, spreadsheets are commonly designed to be edited manually, which makes automation difficult.

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.

Most banks nowadays provide e-banking interfaces that allow clients to monitor the state of their accounts. However, each bank has its own system and the provided interfaces sometimes lack functionalities. Consequently, I decided to create my own finance dashboard, that combines information regarding multiple accounts. Currently I use it to keep track of my bank accounts balance over time as well as provide a breakdown of my transactions.

An image is worth a thousand words and probably even more if comparing their size in bytes. When designing my CMS, I originally intended to store images directly in the article, encoded in Base64. However, this would considerably increase the size of each article, making the whole CMS slow.