Hi there…

My name is Rich and this is my little place to save the things I often do but often forget how to do… This site was originally hosted on Wordpress but that was expensive and an ongoing drain on keeping everything up to date, backed up and running. It’s now built using Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare pages for free :-)

Fronius Load Management Rules and Home Assistant Integration

TL;DR Use Fronius GEN24 Load Management Relay states to control Zigbee / Wifi switches in Home Assistent by MQTT. This isn’t a full step-by-step guide but, if you’re here, you probably know enough to fill in the gaps for your setup. We own a Fronius Gen24 Plus inverter in our solar installation. This inverter has four internal load management relays which allow users to switch loads on and off according to rules....

August 8, 2025

Stop and Disable systemd-resolved

When I build a Pi-Hole server I usually install it in Docker on an Ubuntu Server on an old Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC. The default install of Ubuntu has systemd-resolved installed which clashes when you bring the Pi-hole Docker container up. I can never remember the steps to disable systemd-resolved so this is my reminder :-) Stop and Disable systemd-resolved Check the Status of systemd-resolved: First, check if systemd-resolved is running:...

October 27, 2024

How I Quickly Make a New Hugo Post

As I’ve been migrating this website from Wordpress, I’ve been manually creating folder structure in VS Code and manually filling in front matter. It’s been painful! After a good holiday, I decided there must be a better way so this is just my reminder on how I do it for my site: Create a Post with Current Date in YYYY/MM/DD Format hugo new posts/$(date +"%Y/%m/%d")/my-post-slug/index.md Complete Example: For a post titled “How I Quickly Make a New Hugo Post”, the command would be:...

October 14, 2024

How the boys see me!

June 15, 2024

The Head Office – Indoor Air Quality by Monitoring CO2

The Aranet4 DIY CO2 Monitor The Project on Github The PCB’s (Printed Circuit Boards) – Seeed Studio PCB Manufacture SCD30 Sensor (Video) SCD40 Sensor (Video) Pick and Place Robot (Video) Soldering Through Hole Components (Video) Soldering Surface Mount Devices (Video) Dashboards and Historical Data

November 7, 2023

Taranaki COVID Data

TDHB have stopped publishing data. This data now comes from what is available through Āwhina. This data appears to be no longer available. Gaps in Active Cases is due to difficulty locating a data source when TDHB stopped publishing. Last update 21st June 2022

March 16, 2022

The Head Office Coding Resources - Week 8

Motors with the Pi Pico…

November 17, 2021

The Head Office Coding Resources - Week 4

Data Sheets HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor What is Voltage? Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it is right or will work for you! How to Use an Ultrasonic Sensor with Raspberry Pi Pico HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Range Sensor on the Raspberry Pi https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-sensor-on-the-raspberry-pi

August 17, 2021

The Head Office Coding Resources - Week 1

Books Download Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico Download the Raspberry Pi Pico Python SDK Software Visual Studio Code Thonny Micropy Cli – a project management/generation tool for writing Micropython code in modern IDEs such as VSCode. Hardware AliExpress is a wonderful source of cheap electronic components for your projects. If you plan in advance and don’t mind waiting two to six weeks for components to arrive it’s perfect....

June 30, 2021

Raspberry Pi Kernel Firmware Upgrade / Downgrade

I’ve been looking at a problem with one of my Raspberry Pi projects freezing every now and again. I have a suspicion from reading recent posts that it could be kernel related. I found a good article here which also links to the rpi-update utility on Github here The great thing here is the utility allows a downgrade. I can also never remember how to find the current kernel version so, for me, this is what I use:...

September 17, 2018