Pim Widdershoven

I bought some NodeMCU ESP32-WROOM-32 development boards to monitor temperatures of my central heating system with 20+ underfloor heating groups. I want to know the temperature of each group to optimize the system. I use ESPEasy because it is more or less plug-and-play. In this blog post I share how you flash and install ESPEasy on your ESP32.

Developing on Windows was challenging before Microsoft introduced WSL 2. Running Linux Virtual Machines with SMB/CIFS shares mounted into Windows was the best solution I could come up before there were tools like Vagrant. But all these solutions have one common problem. They mounted a Windows volume in Linux or visa versa which resulted in (very) poor I/O performance. Fortunately, WSL 2 resolves all these issues by running Docker and IDE's like Jetbrains IntelliJ, PyCharm and PHPStorm in WSL 2.

The main question when using WSL2 for development purposes is where to store the source code of your project. In this blog post I will explain why I recommend you to store your source code in WSL2 instead of in Windows.

It's easy to deploy Elasticsearch on Kubernetes. You get yourself a copy of the Elastic Helm Charts and you run helm install. Job well done... or not? The default Elasticsearch configuration doesn't enable any encryption or security mechanism, that doesn't sound really safe! In this blog post, I'll explain how you secure your Elasticsearch instance by enabling encryption (SSL transport and HTTP over SSL) and native authentication.

I'm a bit conservative about automating my home because of the vendor lock-in or the requirement to have a central hub. Last Black Friday I came across the Shelly products. Shelly doesn't require a central hub and only needs a Wi-Fi connection and there isn't a vendor lock-in because the modules do have their own web interface and API. Interesting and I bought a couple of Shelly 1's! In this article more about the Shelly 1 and how I use them to automate my front door and back door lights.

In this blog post, I'll explain how you deploy a brand new Kubernetes Cluster with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). Rancher Kubernetes Engine doesn't include the Rancher management application itself and will deploy a vanilla Kubernetes Cluster for you, the exact same thing as kubeadm can do for you but much more simple!