Lazzes Smart Home - 2023

Here is an overview of the components in the Smart Home as of now. More stuff than I tought :-)

Beware of the short circuit

One of my Pico W sensors stops working from time to time. I've enabled the watchdog for auto-magic reboots, but even so, sometimes it just dies. 

The sensor cable is about 50cm, at the end I have a DHT20 Temp and Humidity sensor (Köp DHT20 (AHT20) Temperatur- och Luftfuktighetssensor | sizable.se). I have pull-up resistors mounted at the sensor end of the cable. 

I'm measuring the outside temperature with this sensor,  so I'm mounting it on the underside of our master bedrooms windowsill. For mounting I'm using a blob of adhesive glue. When I "made it stick" to the underside of the windowsill I also bent the connectors on the sensor, so the middle data wire was shorted to ground - intermittently!

Looking for a cheap box to house your sensor / IoT-stuff

 Here in Sweden I found this awesome cheap box that suited my IoT projects perfectly - Köp Apparatlåda PC002 med håltagning – grå till rätt pris @ Electrokit, Swedish price about 15 SEK ( 1.5 USD )

You can easily fit a Raspberry Pico (W) or an Arduino PCB in this box. It's made of easy to mold and drill plastic.

I bought like 10 pcs - you never know what you want to build next!

VLC player, file cache settings

If you, like me - use VLC mediaplayer to view all your media, you may have run into the same problem as I. That is, when we watch multiple movies on different computers, sometime the media will lag/fall behind. This is especially true, if the computer is connected via WiFi instead of LAN.

However, there is an easy fix! Start VLC player and go to tools -> preferences. Select "view all" instead of simple mode.

Then go to Input/Codecs -> Access Modules -> Files

I changed the default caching value(ms) from 300 to 3000 and Extra networking caching from 900 to 9000.

Now, all VLC players will read a larger portion of the media file and cache it locally, thus being more robust for network problems!

Happy viewing!

// Lazze

Want to learn more? Riding the edge of wisdom

Just wanted to give you all Microsoft Developers out there a heads up on the excellent company Plural Sights! They offer lots of online courses for free, for instance MVC 3 tutorials.

If you, like me, want to watch all tutorials it will just set you back 29 USD / month!

So, what are you waiting for! Head over to Plural Sights and get sharper!

// Lazze

Win 8 in the virtual flesh

Want to take Windows 8 for a test spin? Don't want to wipe your main computer doing it? Running it virtual is for you :-)

First things first, here is the URL for downloading Win 8 Developer Preview:

I tried to install Win 8 x64/x86 on VM Workstation 7 and the Virtual PC under Win 7 x64 - alas, no luck! VM Ware reported "unhandled core error" and Virtual PC reported "HAL init error". As a last resort, I tried to install it under Parallels 7 on my MBP(OSX Lion) - and behold, it worked!

Fueled by success, I updated my VM Workstation to version 8 - now it works like a charm! I haven't tried VM Player yet. But if you run into problems, I guess that you can use the trial for Workstation 8 to create the virtual Win 8 machine. Then load it up in the player.

Last, don't forget to install the VM Ware tools!

Some good links:

VM Ware player

Securable(util for checking that you have VT-d and other good stuff)

MS HAV detection tool

Good luck!

// Lazze




I just got confirmation that Win 8 Dev Pre will also run on virtual box.

DivX register-app won't start under 64 bit OS

The DivX register app is hardcoded to use the System32 folder as path for Rundll32, which of course doesn't exist on a 64bit system. So when running Vista 64, you'll have to use a command similiar to this:

C:\Windows\Syswow64\rundll32.exe C:\Windows\System32\dtu100.dll,dtuSerialRunDll 7B63B2922B174135AFC0E1377DD81EC2

To start the DivX-regApp

// Lazze

Vista network slowdown when using media apps

Vista throttles networkspeed to keep multimedia viewing glitch free - but they have missed that we'rent using 286's no more...

To disable the "feature"

Regedit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AudioSrv

Key "DependOnServices" - edit the list, remove "MMCSS"

Quit regedit, start MSCONFIG -> Services -> Disable "Multimedia Scheduler"

Reboot and Njoy networkspeed even when listening to a MP3

// Lazze