How hard could it be to make one myself?
My parents recently had a ‘smart thermostat’ installed. It got me to thinking: how hard could it really be to make one myself?
Even as a young child I can remember craving technology: miniature portable technology in particular. From the mini TVs and games systems of the early 90s, through the Palm Pilots and Nokia Communicators of the late 90s, to the handheld heaven that emerged at the turn of the millennium, I’ve consistently coveted other people’s gadgets! I used to think miniature electronic devices and things like ‘home automation’ were pursuits of the wealthy: the Bruce Waynes and Tony Starks of this world. That was until yesterday when I received this:
Tiny, isn’t it!? That’s a single board computer: as in, a…
I recently published my first Python package on pypi.org. It’s a fairly simple module that checks and updates IP forwarding rules on Google Domains. It’s pretty functional and can be run with various options from the command line and, for example, scheduled to run via the user’s crontab, but it can also be imported into a project.
The next logical step was to try and integrate it into a Django application, and I chose my little portfolio web app project as a target (it’s too embarrassing to link to here, but I’m sure you could find it without too much…
I recently decided to set up a web server on a Rasberry Pi running behind my home router. I have experience setting up web servers on virtual linux machines with static IPs so there was nothing too different about setting up an apache2 server on the Pi and there are hundreds of tutorials all over the internet. The only issue is that when the external IP of your router changes — the site breaks! One way round this is to pay your ISP for a static IP… but where’s the fun in that?!
For a lot of my latest projects…
Michael Jarvis
Fledgling Python Developer
