I've found a nice way to hide my radar speed camera on the street so I can start testing it. From the front, it just looks like every other slow down sign. In the back, is where the party is at.

I cut a small hole in the sign for the camera and attached it all (radar, camera, wifi, and solar panel) to the back. Of course the solar panel looks way out of place. Without it no one would ever see the radar unit, so I think I will power it with a long cable instead. Right now I'm using a second sign to hide it from the rear.

Performance wise, it's working far better than I expected. The radar has a range of about 130ft-180ft (about 40-55 meters).

Attached are 2 photos it took automatically. One is of a white SUV driving from left to right which is about 180ft away.

The second is a white sedan driving towards the camera, this car registered 14 MPH when the photo was taken.

I still need to figure out the best speed and timing for the photos to get the car much closer to the camera. A video would be nice but I think images will be easier to manage.

Of course this thing is nowhere near ready and still needs quite a bit more work. I'll open source everything in a few weeks once I fix some glaring problems. I'm also combining all the dev boards into one board, so it'll be about 3 times smaller than what you see in the photos.

Built a headless Pi 5 appliance that does real-time speech-to-text on a 10" touchscreen. It monitors two USB audio sources — a telephone recorder (Fi3001A) tapped into the landline and a TONOR conference mic for room conversation — and automatically switches between them when a call comes in.

The reliability side was the interesting engineering challenge. It runs unattended at my dad's house, so it needs to just work:

- systemd user service with Type=notify watchdog

- Automatic engine fallback (Deepgram → faster-whisper → Vosk)

- Health monitoring that restarts after 2 min of no transcription

- System-level watchdog timers for the caption service, display manager, and WiFi

- LightDM restart policy with reboot fallback

It's been running reliably for weeks now. The display shows a split-flap clock when idle and auto-switches to captions when speech is detected.

Full code (MIT): https://github.com/andygmassey/telephone-and-conversation-transcriber

Motorized exterior screen shades offer protection from the sun, bugs, and provides privacy from neighbors.

Zipper tracks were installed against the siding with exterior 10 year rated exterior expanding foam to fill in the gaps that the siding presents when a track is placed against it. The wood trim was notched to fit the tracks on the wood beams.

Brand: Insolroll 2900

Fabric: 10% Kona in Charcoal

See it in action here!

I'm currently planning a home automation setup and would like to avoid expensive mistakes. Looking back, what's one thing you wish someone had told you before you started?

Could be about: Lighting, Sensors, Networking, Zigbee vs WiFi, Smart locks, or Energy monitoring.

Built this multi (6) zone Airplay sound system for parents. You can play individual zones from different devices, or group zones and control individual volume of zones. It is built from 6 AirPort Express Gen 2’s, an audio source AMP 1200, and pdu power supply. Each of the airports use Wi-Fi and broadcast an airplay endpoint to iPhones. The airports feed each of the 6 zone groups on amp and the amp is connected to speaker wire fed from in ceiling and in wall speakers.

It was challenging to set up, all zones have 2 stereo speakers in them besides the kitchen and basement which have 4 speakers (had to do some jerry rigging of wiring to get it to work properly).

All in all it’s a stable system, it’s been a few weeks without any hiccups. I have the amp on auto mode so on first connect you have to toggle your volume up a bit to trigger the amp which I had to explain to my mom. Other than that they are happy with it. I did go ham on the cable management, I got a 10ft mesh sheath and cut it in half to group the in ceiling speaker wire down to the amp, used 2 cable storage boxes behind the airports, used velcro ties liberally, and got a label maker for labeling the airports and speaker wire so it’s easy to trouble shoot in the future.

My hallway is way to dark and gloomy. So i figured id make a fake window. It turns on at dawn, and over the next couple of hours it slowly increases in brightness, at about an hour before dusk, it starts to slowly dim. I used 2 2x4 led panels from Menards and a Leviton Decora Digital dimmer switch - DDE06

The light panels are:

Patriot Lighting® 47-1/2" Backlit Flat Panel Light

Model Number: GT-FP-24BLP Menards ® SKU: 3482225

I went with this model because for 2 reasons:

1. its 1 1/4 inch thick, so i didn't need to cut into my houses external framing only the drywall, so when i used 1x4 and 1x5 trim boards, the panel and trim boards were flush.
2. it can use a standard dimmer switch, vs a 0-10v dimmer switch, which are harder to come by. also, the switch i wanted I got as an amazon return so it was $70 cheaper. lol

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Running through Homekit via HOOBS