Author: Caleb

Taiwan summer’s are hot and sticky, and would be a nightmare without air conditioning. Unfortunately this hasn’t been so kind on our electric bill. My girlfriend and I now turn off the AC unit when no one is home (after one hefty electric bill), but since we both have erratic schedules, this has limited our ability to utilize the AC’s built in timer. Meaning we often come home to a hot house. We also rent, so installing a new thermostat is also not an option. The air conditioner does have a remote control though, so if I were to reverse engineer its protocol, I could trigger it remotely with an ESP8266 and IR LED before returning home.

Continue reading “Hitachi RE09T1 AC Remote Emulation With an ESP8266 – Part 1: Protocol Analysis”

I have a 15” Sony PVM CRT monitor in my workshop that I use occasionally for my Nintendo, but mostly use for watching DVD’s on.  I also had a Raspberry Pi 3 that I installed RetroPie and Kodi on, and I wanted a way to connect it to my PVM through its RGB inputs, and not using the standard RCA composite output on the Pi. 

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi to RBG Video on Sony PVM”

This past holiday season I received as a white elephant gift an older outdoor weatherproof telephone by Allen Tel. Prod.  From what I could tell this phone was used at the local community college by the campus police.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a whole lot of information on this model, and its lack of a dial limited what I could do with it.

After it sat idly for a couple of months, I decided I could use it to link my workshop and house together.  I already had a payphone from the 80’s sitting in my workshop, and figured that if I created an Asterisks installation then these phones could talk to one another over VoIP.

Continue reading “Allen Telephone Wiring & VoIP”

I’ve recently acquired a hand full of older DEC terminals.  My favorite of these is a DEC VT220 from September 1984.  It originally started up fine, but over the last 6 months it’s acted up in a couple of different ways.  I thought I’d post about how I resolved these issues in case anyone else runs across them. Continue reading “DEC VT220 Horizontal Roll & Power Problems”