Electrical engineer writing down the hardware, home automation, and software projects I build at home. Mostly implementation notes, failure modes, command lines, and the details I know I’ll need again.
Reading Build
I recently asked Claude for book recommendations tailored to where I am in my career right now. Build by Tony Fadell came up. I started reading it and was really glad I did. It was written to help founders and executives build companies. The makers inside those companies get just as much from it. What it actually does is give you precise language for things you’ve already experienced but never had words for. Problems you felt but couldn’t name. Org dynamics you survived but couldn’t diagnose. ...
Self-Hosted Obsidian Sync on a Raspberry Pi with Tailscale
Two spare Pis sitting around. Already running AdGuard, so Pi-hole was off the table. I wanted something actually useful. I’ve been paying $10/month for Obsidian Sync. The vault lives on my hardware anyway — it felt like paying rent on my own stuff. The alternative: run CouchDB on a Pi, point the Self-hosted LiveSync plugin at it, and use Tailscale to make the Pi reachable from anywhere without port forwarding or a public IP. E2E encrypted, zero ongoing cost, fully under my control. ...
DIY Ambilight Part 2: Capture Working, LEDs Are Next!
The splitter finally showed up. This session was about seeing if the signal chain actually worked end to end — Apple TV → splitter → TV + B101 — and getting at least one real captured frame out of it. No LEDs wired yet, just proving the capture side works and figuring out the layout. Getting the B101 to see the signal First step after wiring everything up was setting the EDID so the B101 knows what kind of signal to advertise to the Apple TV: ...
Migrating derekwelty.com to Hugo + GitHub Actions
derekwelty.com was a Bootstrap 5 single-page site built on the Start Bootstrap Freelancer template. It worked, but it hadn’t been touched in years and updating it required wading through jQuery, a Gulp pipeline, and a bunch of hand-rolled CSS. Time to replace it. The new stack: Hugo with the Congo theme, deployed to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions. Why Hugo I already run this blog on Hugo + PaperMod via Netlify. The toolchain was familiar, the build times are fast, and Congo gave me a clean profile layout that actually looked like a personal site and not a blog template with the posts removed. ...
Building a DIY Ambilight on a Raspberry Pi 3 with an Auvidea B101
I saw a FancyLEDs sponsorship on YouTube and figured I could build the same thing myself for less, with hardware I already had — including a B101 capture board from a prior project I never finished. Govee makes something similar but it only works with their own app — useless with an Apple TV or anything else plugged into HDMI. I wanted something source-agnostic, fully local, no subscription. This is a working log: capture pipeline is proven, splitter arrives tomorrow, LEDs not yet wired. ...
TRMNL X BYOS: Self-Hosting the Server Before the Device Arrives
I ordered a TRMNL X e-ink display to put on my desk. It’s a 7.5" e-paper panel that polls a server for images and refreshes on a schedule. TRMNL has a cloud service, but I’m not paying a subscription for a display I can host myself — and BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) mode is the whole reason I bought the X model over the cheaper ones. The device hasn’t arrived yet. The server is already running. ...
IKEA Varmblixt as a Home Assistant Status Light
I wanted a passive ambient display that tells me something useful without picking up my phone — weather at a glance during the day, a wind-down mode at night, green at 6:30am if it’s worth cycling to work. The IKEA Varmblixt is $30, Zigbee-native, and pairs directly to ZHA without an IKEA hub. Pairing Not obvious. There’s no reset button. To enter pairing mode, power-cycle the lamp 12 times in rapid succession — plug, unplug, plug, unplug… It flashes white 3–4 times when it’s ready. A smart plug makes this way easier than fumbling with the physical outlet. Source ...
Building Molty: A Telegram Assistant with Memory and Scheduled Checks
ChatGPT worked fine for one-off questions, but it was isolated from the systems I actually use: calendar, email, Strava, GitHub, Obsidian, Spotify, and the half-finished project notes scattered across repos. I wanted a small assistant I could run myself, with persistent memory, scheduled checks, and enough tool access to be useful without turning into a full product. So I built Molty. Architecture Molty runs on OpenClaw — an open agent platform that handles the gateway infrastructure: Telegram integration, LLM API routing, and session management. It runs on a Hostinger VPS. I didn’t build any of that. What I built is everything layered on top: the memory system, integrations, heartbeat logic, and skills. ...
Building a Concert Discovery Tool with Spotify and Venue Scrapers
I kept missing shows I would have gone to. The data was public, but checking it required a weird amount of manual attention: venue calendars, Spotify history, ticket prices, neighborhoods, and a final “would I actually leave the apartment for this?” filter. I built a weekly concert digest into Molty, my Telegram-based assistant. Every Monday morning it checks SF venues, matches artists against my Spotify library, and sends a ranked list of shows. ...