Blog entries from October, 2024

After my recent incident with my front door being open unexpectedly I started to look into Zigbee and Z-Wave devices for integration into Home Assistant. I quickly started to lean towards Zigbee for both price and ease of use reasons, but I was going to take it slow in case I did pivot to using Z-Wave.

(side note: while technically Zigbee is used to get data from my smart meter, that is a custom/closed interface that I cannot access)

To get started I ordered a Zigbee gateway, a couple of Sonoff door sensors, and also stopped by Ikea to pick up a couple of their door sensors. While there I also saw their motion/light sensor, so grabbed one of those.

When the gateway arrived I set it up on my wifi and then pointed the ZHA integration in Home Assistant at it. This worked but it felt quite slow and clunky. After doing some more reading I learned that they recommended against using serial-to-IP over wifi, exactly what I was doing.

My next setup was to bring up a container for Zigbee2MQTT connecting to the same Zigbee gateway. This was a much nicer experience so that is what I went with… for a few days. While initially this would work and respond immediately to the door sensor or motion sensor, after a couple of days it became less reliable, sometimes just dropping out and requiring both the gateway and container to be restarted.

I realised I needed to simplify the connection between Zigbee2MQTT and the gateway, make it as direct as possible. Looking at available options I decided on a SMLIGHT SLZB-07p7 Zigbee coordinator which has a USB connection, meaning as direct serial connection as possible between zigbee2mqtt and the gateway/coordinator as possible.

However I was running Zigbee2MQTT in a container on the linux box in my study, this is not the best location for the Zigbee coordinator, I still wanted that central to my house which means the laundry (where I had placed the first Zigbee gateway). So how to solve this? With a Pi 3 model A+ as I used for the RAVEn smart meter dongle:

I have read that there might be interference between the Zigbee and wifi for this configuration, but that can be reduced by spacing them out with a short USB extension cable. For now it has been working quite well, but as always, time will tell…

It is weird to recall that at one point I was actively collecting vintage computers, with one goal to have an example of every Apple computer. Over time my enthusian waned and I downsized the collection, in conjunction with looking to buy a house.

Then for over a decade the remaining items sat untouched at my parent’s (with only the occasional prompt to do something about them) until the middle of 2013 when I brought over of the Apple IIgs related items. This was my childhood computer and my first step in getting it running again was to replace the power supply with something modern. I tinkered with this for a while, getting a GBS-8220 for converting the display output and picking up a CFFA3000 for more convenient drive emulation.

Skip forward to the middle of 2024 and I set myself the goal of sorting through what was left of the collection and having it all gone from my parents house by the end of the year.

That goal has been achieved three months early.

I would have liked to gift items to people that I know would use it (this is what I am doing with one system) but I decided to to see how things would go in eBay, in one sense returning the items back to where I got them from. I started with a few of the smaller items that could be easily posted then progressing to the heaver items. As I was more interested in finding homes that in making money I started almost all the listings at $9.99, some sold for that starting price while others went for quite a lot more.

It was good to see that there were a variety of people bidding, some I could see also had ebay stores so would be buying to flip, while others (mainly those that I spoke to when they collected items in person) were actually interested in collecting and restoring vintage computers.

I am not going to update my computer collection pages, but because I took updated photos for the ebay listings, I have put those photos up in an album on Flickr: Vintage Apple for eBay.

Going through these images one last time did make me feel nostalgic, but only for the act of collecting. Better that they are in the hands of people that wanted them enough to bid for them, instead of just taking up space…