Rajiv's blog

A long time ago I realised that I'm driven by curiosity to learn new stuff regardless of whether or not I have anything to gain from learning it. For example, I use (and support) Windows at work, have a perfectly good Mac at home but do all my tinkering with a Linux laptop just to learn about all the main operating systems available today. I even switched from a perfectly good Ubuntu installation to Arch Linux simply because I wanted to explore another distribution. I also find myself re-inventing the wheel and building things, not because I have a need for them, but because I can. This is exactly what the Pi-Touch project I started in Spring 2017 is: a touchscreen clock radio that could easily have been created using a tablet and a few apps but which I chose to build myself using a Raspberry Pi 3 and an official 7" touchscreen .  There are many tutorials on the Internet for installing and configuring Music Player Daemon  and tons of examples on how to control the com

In late 2015 I realised that most of the TV shows I watched were broadcast free (in HD) over the air and those that weren't could be bought from Google Play or Apple iTunes. When I did the math, I figured that the annual cost for this set up would be less than what I was paying for my cable subscription. So I cancelled my cable subscription and used the money saved to buy a HD HomeRun device and a cheap internal antenna. I was now able to stream over-the-air HD broadcasts over my network. I already used Plex as a media server and was delighted when they added DVR functionality that worked with my HD HomeRun just as I was looking around to improve my rudimentary DVR solution. I bought myself a lifetime membership to Plex and haven't looked back since. I now have one Ubuntu Linux VM that does the DVR recording and a physical Windows 10 computer dedicated to running Plex  and streaming media to the various devices in our home. All my media is saved on a 2-bay Synology NAS

In late 2015, I got interested in the  Raspberry Pi - the single board computer that everybody was talking about. The idea of a small cheap computer intrigued me and I just had to get one to play with. Once I got one in early 2016 and got it all connected up and working, I realised that it was not much use to me as a regular computer because I already had bigger and faster computers. However, this cute little computer just sat there begging me to make something using it so I searched the web to see what other people were building to get some ideas. The robots that others had built looked really cool so, while I waited for the parts for my smart home project to arrive, my thoughts turned to building a robot army and mad schemes for world domination! Sadly, I quickly realised that I didn't have a clue about where to start so, like any modern-day arch-villain, I turned to Google. After doing a lot of research and exploring the expensive kits available I opted to start small and

Now that I have finally got round to getting a blog up and running I can start posting about some of the things I’ve been tinkering with... The last time I played around with micro-controllers, LED and resistors was in university so during the winter of 2015, when I started thinking about starting a hobby to pass the time, I decided to get an Arduino Starter Kit . I thought it would be a nice way to refresh my memory and expose my kids to the world of electronics. They liked the flashing lights and buzzing noises but got bored with typing code into the Arduino IDE. I, however, was hooked and started looking for something to build. IoT being all the rage, I decided to try and make my home "Smart". While doing my research I came across  MySensors , a web site focusing on do-it-yourself home automation and Internet of Things. Thanks to their excellent guides I was eventually able to build a small network of temperature and humidity sensors that communicated with a MQTT ga

Today my younger daughter sat down with my father to find out about our ancestors. She discovered the names of her forefathers going back 11 generations! Surendra Harakhchand Nemchand Fulchand Karman Khima Lala Kachra Bharmal Raishi Raimal We also learnt that my great grandfather, Nemchand, left our ancestral village, Kansumra, and sailed from  India in a dhow to start a new life in Kenya on his own when he was only 10 years old!