Update July 2025. From the comments I see many people having problems replicating what I did. I strongly suspect compatibility issues with the latest Arduino software / IDE. I originally did this work in 2022 so there will have been…
Siglent SSA3021X Spectrum Analyzer Web Interface
I have a Siglent SSA3021X spectrum analyzer. I like it a lot, and it’s been used for some other posts here. For example looking at LORA signals. I’ve long wished it had a web interface for screen captures. So I…
Viewing LoRa Spread Spectrum on a Spectrum Analyzer
I’ve been doing an interesting project, writing some LoRa code in Python on an ESP32. There are lots of resources on the web, including other example codebases in github etc, which means I didn’t have to start from scratch. Fairly…
Experiments with Bathroom R7S LED Light Bulbs
We have a couple of bathrooms each containing five 100W halogen 78mm R7S light bulbs. Those things get hot; it’s like having a heater in there, even in the summer! Plus burning 500 watts is a great way to jack…
Elantra Hatchback Lift Supports Replacement
We have a 2013 Hyundai Elantra GT hatchback. It’s a little over 5 years old and the back hatch no longer stays up. The lift supports struts had worn out. Five years is a pretty short life for lift supports…
MQTT Test Topic
This is a test of the DIOT MQTT plugin. Although it looks rather boring, I’ll leave this post up because it’s useful for testing. [diot topic=”frankvh_test/test_topic”] [diot topic=”ecava/igx/temp”] Some data should appear. If you see any numbers changing, then…
Fun With MQTT, using ESP8266, Arduino and Android
MQTT is a simple protocol for sharing small packets of data with multiple devices. Although it’s been around since 1999, the last few years it’s been growing in popularity as part of the whole “internet of things” movement. I decided…
FreeNAS upgrade – Making Rsync Backups Work Again
Recently I upgraded to FreeNAS 9.10. Not that there was anything inherently wrong with my previous 9.2 system, however it was booting from a USB stick, which died (my second USB stick to die over the past few years), so…
SSD1289 Landscape Mode & TFT Screen Rotation
A lot of the SSD1289 based TFT displays commonly available ship by default in portrait mode. Which is to say, 240 pixels across by 320 pixels deep. When you read the SSD1289 datasheet it would appear the chip defaults to…
Turn off XML-RPC on WordPress
This site is running WordPress, which is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it’s a stable easy-to-use system with lots of options, themes, customizations, etc. On the negative side, it’s very popular hence WordPress sites are a popular target…