Don't use the X725 for your Raspberry Pi

Leaving the previous post up as a warning for future me’s. Don’t follow it. Do not use the X725. As it turns out, it can (and will) at some point fry the SD card, leaving you with a bricked NAS. From the looks of it, chances of this are highest when it loses main power, which you’d think would be the main point of a battery-backed UPS system. It is not a question of whether this will happen, but when.

Custom RAID NAS with Raspberry Pi

Edit: WARNING Do not follow the advice in this post. Do not get the X725. Recently, my old NAS system died on me, and I was in the market for something else. The only thing I use it for is backups, so I don’t really need much in terms of fancy NAS features like seamless streaming and a web-interfaces. One thing that had been annoying me for several years (on several ready-made NAS boxes) though was the software in general: either it was propietary, or it was Linux-based but modified for the NAS hardware.

LED clock

Another project nearing comple^h^h^h good enough to hang on a wall: A LED-based clock, with light as hands. It all started out when I found the awesome NeoPixel line of products from Adafruit, one of the more interesting ones being the 60-LED strip. I picked one up (because you know, because), and the best thing to use it for for now was a clock. I had an ATTiny AVR lying around, and wanted to make something to replace my pretty boring standard clock.

Philips Hue rf remote control

The Philips Hue lights are awesome, but it can get a bit tiresome to start that phone app, probably wait for the wifi to connect, and then select your scenario. TBH, the app serves pretty wel to configure scenarios, but I am not a really big fan of its interface. I want buttons! Actual, physical buttons. I also wanted to do something with RF anyway to see how it works.

Dodecahedron speaker

This project has been finished (well, finished-ish, as always) for quite a while now, but I just realized I never got around to writing it up. In fact, I already extended it, but that’s something for a different post. Way, way before I even had a printer I saw this Instructable. And immediately fell in love with it. It had never left my mind as a want-to-build-at-some point thing, and some time ago I finally got around to doing it.

Das BlinkenSphere

zo relaxen und watschen das blinkensphere My latest weekend project was to find a use for an Arduino that (due to some recent electromechanical fail on my part) could only be powered over USB. After a few false starts, and with a lot of ideas left to implement, the first prototype is ready: Das BlinkenSphere It’s a little sphere-like object that now sits quietly on my desk and emits a soothing color-of-choice.

Custom restrictor plates for arcade joysticks

The joysticks I got for my arcade cabinet (http://www.arcadewinkel.nl/joysticks/balltop-arcadefighter-stick-rood) were fine, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the restrictor plates that came with it. They worked fine in 4-way mode, but the 8-way mode was simply a square and that doesn’t work nicely in most circumstances. So I was looking around for replacement plates (preferably ones with octagons or maybe even smarter restriction holes), but couldn’t really find any. And then I realized I have an f’in 3d-printer.

Arcade cabinet marquee art

The vinyl for my custom marquee arrived! Thanks to drsticker for helping me choose vinyl type, and of course for the printing service :) So the final cabinet looks a little something like this:

Building an arcade cabinet

Over the past few years, the idea had already surfaced a few times, but I never actually got myself to start this little project. But a few days into January, the bug suddenly hit me hard, and I couldn’t resist anymore: I wanted to build my own arcade cabinet. Every nontrivial endeavour starts out with a little bit of research, and luckily the idea wasn’t exactly original; there are a lot of tips and howtos, as well as some very strong opinions on How It Must Be Done to be found online.

Home NAS setup with Thecus N5550

(tl;dr: use latest rdup for backups, and thecus has problems with some drives, even from the compatibility list, if so, try updating firmware). So I recently saw a reasonably good deal on the Thecus N5550, a 5-bay hot-swappable NAS machine. This seemed as good a time as any to finally clean up my backups and Do Them Right. So the plan is to see how much the already excellent rdup has progressed (last time I used it was at version 0.