Chris Capobianco

I just finished writing the code for an idea I had about a year ago, but until now I was not sure how to implement it. The code is just a POC at the moment, though I am not sure if this idea has any real value. That said, I did privately share the code with a knowledgeable and trustworthy friend. Perhaps between the two of us, we can determine a use case. Though I have tentatively set a date -- one or two years hence -- upon which I will release the code as open source, if we cannot find a viab...

So the IR LEDs that we use to illuminate our daughter's room started to fail recently, enough that we noticed a significant decrease in visibility on the baby monitor. When I inspected the IR LEDs, only 1/3 were working. I found some replacement LED boards on AliExpress, and they arrived yesterday. But the replacements boards were smaller then the exisiting one. I thought I screwed myself over since I did not check the dimensions before placing the order, but then I noticed something. The LED b...

We went to the Rockwood Conservation Area, and my daugther had a great time playing in the sand and the lake. Once she realized that the lake was like a giant bath, she wanted to go into the water and splash constantly. I swam across the lake and back, so I am very tired. All in all it was a good day. Before I went to bed, I tried working with these 8x8 pixel displays I purchased a few years ago. The last time I used them they would only produce random garbage, and when I started using them aga...

We went out for brunch today, and my daugther who has been sick the last week and not always eating or drinking enough, devoured her food and even ate all the bananas and blueberries off my plate. She even drank some of my orange juice, and appeared to enjoy it. We were relieved, and we look forward for her to go back to daycare. I also had two packages arrive today, and I was looking forward to testing components and assembling the case for my component tester. Unfortunately the mounting holes...

Had to cancel our trip to Collingwood, our daugther was still not feeling well and travelling with a sick child is not ideal. We will try to do something when she feels better, hopefully that will happen before I have to go back to work. After I complained to my friend Peter that my electronics knowledge is not as good as I wanted, he asked if I wanted a copy of an electronics book he owns. I thought I recognized it, but I wasn't sure where I may have put it. So I decided to clean up some of th...

Managed to resume my GMail backups after a 4 year hiatus, using gmvault. The author created a docker version, and I was able to resume where I left off. Now I want to set this up for my wife as well, but I will have to use a separate container. Each container runs it's own set of daily and weekly cron jobs to backup the emails. If this works correctly, I should look at what they do so I could use that approach for my personal projects. I am also taking Monday to Wednesday off for vacation, we...

In frustration, I updated the cron script to reboot the RPi Zero if it is unable to establish a connection to the main router. It is a little heavy-handed, but I was getting really frustrated that the baby monitor was not connected when we needed it. Perhaps I will find a better method of re-establishing the WiFi connection without rebooting the RPi Zero. UPDATE: 2020-08-21 Our network has stabilized since I added this hack, and the RPi Zero has not rebooted yet. Now that things has settled, I ...

Turns out that cron script does not work. The baby monitor lost WiFi connection twice, and both times I had to reboot the router for the connection to be restored. Looking at the logs I saw the entries when it was not able to connect to the router, but those commands did not allow it to re-establish a connection. My parents and my brother came by today to help remove most of the junk we had accumulated in our yard over several years. The first load came in at 695 kg, mostly because of all the e...

Parts arrived today for the activity centre (a.k.a. busy box) that I am making for my daugther. Some of the surface mounted components are extremely tiny, I may need to buy pair of magnifying glasses so that I can see what I am doing. Perhaps one of the cheap ones available at the pharmacy will work. Network outages are still happening, but now only in the evening while we are streaming some shows. The outage is short, but still frustating especially if it happens multiple times. The issue with...

I was going to write tonight that finding a bizarre entry in the logs files on my old desktop about the Network Manager going to sleep (which is odd for Ethernet connection, rather then a WiFi connection), may have been the cause of all the network outages we were experiencing. I do not know how the Sleep Mode was enabled, but perhaps one of the many software updates that came through added to our network instability. Then the router rebooted itself twice this evening, in the middle of streamin...

Went to visit our neighbour this afternoon to catch up with them. Mina mentioned that we may be moving after she finishes her degree, and they were surprised. They assumed we would be staying around for a long time, but we may have to move to wherever Mina can find work in her field. We hope I can also find similar work there as well. I have been running PiHole on my desktop for the last 24 hours, and after updating the Router and the TV, everything has been working fine. Though I just noticed ...

Removed the manual DNS on the router, disabled PiHole on my old desktop, installed PiHole on my current desktop and added a manual DNS on the router on point to my current desktop. Everything seems to work, I just need to update the static DNS on the SmartTV and I will see how stable PiHole is supposed to be. After installing PiHole, but before updating the router it forced my computer to reboot when it was not able to connect to the router. I suspect that could be the culprit, so I will have t...

Had lunch with Peter and his daugther today, it was good to catch up in person. I got an email from Amazon, saying the bottle of hand sanitizer I put purchased is not safe to use and is being recalled. The link they shared lists over 50 other brands. I used to refill one of the empty hand sanitizers we use when changing Parisa, but we have not used it yet. I did refill the small bottle we keep in the car, and that one we have used. So we are just going to throw them out, I think we still have b...

Removed the fallback WiFi connections on the babypi monitor, hopefully that will stabilize the IP address hopping I have been observing. It seems that when it connected to one of the other fallback WiFi access points, the router would assign the host a new IP address. I also installed shellinabox on babypi and enabled access in the RPi-Monitor dashboard. It worked immediately, so I thought it would be a good idea to install it on my old desktop and enable it in it's RPi-Monitor dashboard. Unfor...

Scheduled a lunch with Peter on Friday. Played his game that he created using the Godot engine, it was an exercise for an online course he is taking. Organized some of my electronics projects into individual bins, but I still have alot of stuff to put away. I need to find a large lockable storage container, like a filing cabinet or something similar, hopefully one that will not cost too much. ...

Went to Victoria Park this morning, and met up with Parisa's former babysitter. She agreed to take some photos of the three of us while we were there, and some of them were quite good. ...

Went to Grand Bend Beach, we had a great time, but we are very tired. ...

I had the day off today, and the wife and I went out for lunch for the first time since the lockdown started back in March. Then we started to get stuff ready for our trip to Grand Bend on Friday for the day at the beach. ...

I wanted to look at my serial bluetooth board, but I wanted to relax this evening since I am taking the next two days off. I would like to figure out if I actually damaged the HC-05 in my testing of the AT-09 boards, but I also wanted to look at the anniversary gift I made over two years ago and see if I can figure why the alarm does not work as expected. I also need to sketch out the electrical and programmatic design on the activity centre (a.k.a. busy box) for Parisa, as well the design the ...

A package I ordered back in the beginning of May finally arrived. I got a message from AliExpress a few days ago saying my package was on its way, so it seems the original shippment was lost. Considering the time between the message and package arrival, they spared no expense to get it here. So I tested the /component tester, and it works really well! I tested some resistors and capacitors, and the values it comes back with is very close to the marked values. I don't know what I was expecting w...

New keyboard and mouse arrived today, and they both seem to work. I tested them in a few different scenarios, and they both fared quite well. I did not get enough work done today, so I am trying to do a little more work this evening so I do not fall further behind. ...

Had a great day with family today. Parisa had a blast playing with everyone, and even gave her little cousin a kiss. My Dad had expressed interest in making some bread, but he wanted to start by making sourdough bread. He decided not to try making any because he wasn't willing to wait a week for the starter to ferment, so I decided to show him the relatively quick recipe I use. It takes about 3-4 hours, but it could be shaved down to 2-3 hours. So I demonstrated how the recipe for him, but I al...

Visited my brother, sister-in-law and our nephew this afternoon. He is very cute, and quite expressive for a 2.5 month year old. We went to my parents' place for dinner, and to stay overnight. We are celebrating the summer birthdays tomorrow. ...

The wireless transmitters I ordered finally arrived, I received the wireless receivers last week. I tested them out soon after they arrived and they appeared to work sending 5 V through 5 mm of wood, but I wanted to do a more detailed test. So I connected the receiver board to one of the LiPo charger boards I have, and I wanted to observe if I could get a consistent 4.2 V at the LiPo charger. I used a wooden spacer to mimic my use case, which is to providing a wireless charging option for the a...

I was supposed to try working on the HC-05 serial bluetooth board this evening, but I found some interesting websites during the day. One was an easily deployable Wiki, but it appears too complicated for me to use as a knowledge base. I also realized that I can publish notes in my Standard Notes as a blog, but I did not think my notes were sufficiently organized/coherent to warrant a blog. It is nice to know I could move these entries there. I did download BoostNote to organize my notes for my ...

Looking above the granite entrance-way, she noticed the engraved phrase written in Latin: "Sic Itur Ad Astra". Octavio noticed that Dr. Singh-Lee was staring at the words written into the stone, "It means 'Reach for the stars'" he uttered. "Actually it means 'Thus we go to the stars'" she said calmly. "Isn't it the same thing?" he remarked quickly, noting the confidence with which she spoke. "What is at the end of that hallway?" she asked, pointing to the dimly lit walls of the mausoleum. #story...

Found a sketch that creates a radar map from ultrasonic sensors (like US-015), and is processed by a python script. If it is possible to convert the python script into C++, and find a way to display the radar image on a webpage, I could make it available from the ESP32-CAM dashboard. ...

Did a small test of the wireless charging receiver boards I ordered. I plugged one into a 5 V source (an Arduino), and measured a small positive voltage on the other with a multimeter. The reading on the multimeter was not 5 V, but if I created a better setup I might get a more reliable measurement. ...

I stumbled across an interesting algorithm for finding rational approximations to real numbers: Farey Approximation. I found an implementation in Python and C++, but they did not always give the expected answer. I simplified the code, and I was able to get the values that one would expect. ...

I heard the sad news that Grant Imahara from Mythbusters died of a brain aneurysm. He was only eight years older then me, and it got me thinking about my life. Now that we have Parisa, not only do we need to take better care of ourselves, but it makes sense that we get a few things organized in case something terrible were to happen to either of us. Mina and I had already made plans to share access to bank accounts, but now we want to organize all the online/offline things that we should know o...