nas – Dan Q

Milk and Mail Notifications with Flic 2 Buttons

I’ve been playing with a Flic Hub LR and some Flic 2 buttons. They’re “smart home” buttons, but for me they’ve got a killer selling point: rather than locking you in to any particular cloud provider (although you can do this if you want), you can directly program the hub. This means you can produce smart integrations that run completely within the walls of your house.

Here’s some things I’ve been building:

Prerequisite: Flic Hub to Huginn connection

I run a Huginn instance on our household NAS. If you’ve not come across it before, Huginn is a bit like an open-source IFTTT: it’s got a steep learning curve, but it’s incredibly powerful for automation tasks. The first step, then, was to set up my Flic Hub LR to talk to Huginn.

This was pretty simple: all I had to do was switch on “Hub SDK web access open” for the hub using the Flic app, then use the the web SDK to add this script to the hub. Now whenever a button was clicked, double-clicked, or held down, my Huginn installation would receive a webhook ping.

For convenience, I have all button-presses sent to the same Webhook, and use Trigger Agents to differentiate between buttons and press-types. This means I can re-use functionality within Huginn, e.g. having both a button press and some other input trigger a particular action.

You’ve Got Mail!

By our front door, we have “in trays” for each of Ruth, JTA and I, as well as one for the bits of Three Rings‘ post that come to our house. Sometimes post sits in the in-trays for a long time because people don’t think to check them, or don’t know that something new’s been added.

I configured Huginn with a Trigger Agent to receive events from my webhook and filter down to just single clicks on specific buttons. The events emitted by these triggers are used to notify in-tray owners.

Annotated screenshot showing a Huginn Trigger Agent called "Flic Button C (Double) Details". Annotations show that: (1) "C" is the button name and that I label my buttons with letters. (2) "Double" is the kind of click I'm filtering for. (3) The event source for the trigger is a webhook called "Flic Buttons" whose URL I gave to my Flic Hub. (4) The event receiver for my Trigger Agent is called "Dan's In-Tray (Double) to Slack", which is a Slack Agent, but could easily be something more-sophisticated. (5) The first filter rule uses path: bdaddr, type: field==value, and a value equal to the MAC address of the button; this filters to events from only the specified button. (6) The second filter rule uses path: isDoubleClick, type: field==value, and value: true; this filters to events of type isDoubleClick only and not of types isSingleClick or isHold. — Once you’ve made three events for your first button, you can copy-paste from then on.

In my case, I’ve got pings being sent to mail recipients via Slack, but I could equally well be integrating to other (or additional) endpoints or even performing some conditional logic: e.g. if it’s during normal waking hours, send a Pushbullet notification to the recipient’s phone, otherwise send a message to an Arduino to turn on an LED strip along the top of the recipient’s in-tray.

I’m keeping it simple for now. I track three kinds of events (click = “post in your in-tray”, double-click = “I’ve cleared my in-tray”, hold = “parcel wouldn’t fit in your in-tray: look elsewhere for it”) and don’t do anything smarter than send notifications. But I think it’d be interesting to e.g. have a counter running so I could get a daily reminder (“There are 4 items in your in-tray.”) if I don’t touch them for a while, or something?

Remember the Milk!

Following the same principle, and with the hope that the Flic buttons are weatherproof enough to work in a covered outdoor area, I’ve fitted one… to the top of the box our milkman delivers our milk into!

Top of a reinforced polystyrene doorstep milk storage box, showing the round-topped handle. A metal file sits atop the box, about to be used to file down the handle. — The handle on the box was almost exactly the right size to stick a Flic button to! But it wasn’t flat enough until I took a file to it.

Most mornings, our milkman arrives by 7am, three times a week. But some mornings he’s later – sometimes as late as 10:30am, in extreme cases. If he comes during the school run the milk often gets forgotten until much later in the day, and with the current weather that puts it at risk of spoiling. Ironically, the box we use to help keep the milk cooler for longer on the doorstep works against us because it makes the freshly-delivered bottles less-visible.

Milk container, with a Flic 2 button attached to the handle of the lid and a laminated notice attached, reading: "Left milk? Press the button on the Milk Minder. It'll remind us to bring in the milk!" — Now that I had the technical infrastructure already in place, honestly the hardest part of this project was matching the font used in Milk & More‘s logo.

I’m yet to see if the milkman will play along and press the button when he drops off the milk, but if he does: we’re set! A second possible bonus is that the kids love doing anything that allows them to press a button at the end of it, so I’m optimistic they’ll be more-willing to add “bring in the milk” to their chore lists if they get to double-click the button to say it’s been done!

Future Plans

I’m still playing with ideas for the next round of buttons. Could I set something up to streamline my work status, so my colleagues know when I’m not to be disturbed, away from my desk, or similar? Is there anything I can do to simplify online tabletop roleplaying games, e.g. by giving myself a desktop “next combat turn” button?

Flic Infared Transceiver on the side of a bookcase, alongside an (only slighter smaller than it) 20p piece, for scale. — My Flic Hub is mounted behind a bookshelf in the living room, with only its infrared transceiver exposed. 20p for scale: we don’t keep a 20p piece stuck to the side of the bookcase all the time.

I’m quite excited by the fact that the Flic Hub can interact with an infrared transceiver, allowing it to control televisions and similar devices: I’d love to be able to use the volume controls on our media centre PC’s keyboard to control our TV’s soundbar: and because the Flic Hub can listen for UDP packets, I’m hopeful that something as simple as AutoHotkey can make this possible.

Or perhaps I could make a “universal remote” for our house, accessible as a mobile web app on our internal Intranet, for those occasions when you can’t even be bothered to stand up to pick up the remote from the other sofa. Or something that switched the TV back to the media centre’s AV input when consoles were powered-down, detected by their network activity? (Right now the TV automatically switches to the consoles when they’re powered-on, but not back again afterwards, and it bugs me!)

It feels like the only limit with these buttons is my imagination, and that’s awesome.

Syncthing

This last month or so, my digital life has been dramatically improved by Syncthing. So much so that I want to tell you about it.

I started using it last month. Basically, what it does is keeps a pair of directories on remote systems “in sync” with one another. So far, it’s like your favourite cloud storage service, albeit self-hosted and much-more customisable. But it’s got a handful of killer features that make it nothing short of a dream to work with:

The unique identifier for a computer can be derived from its public key. Encryption comes free as part of the verification of a computer’s identity.
You can share any number of folders with any number of other computers, point-to-point or via an intermediate proxy, and it “just works”.
It’s super transparent: you can always see what it’s up to, you can tweak the configuration to match your priorities, and it’s open source so you can look at the engine if you like.

Here are some of the ways I’m using it:

Keeping my phone camera synced to my PC

I’ve tried a lot of different solutions for this over the years. Back in the way-back-when, like everybody else in those dark times, I used to plug my phone in using a cable to copy pictures off and sort them. Since then, I’ve tried cloud solutions from Google, Amazon, and Flickr and never found any that really “worked” for me. Their web interfaces and apps tend to be equally terrible for organising or downloading files, and I’m rarely able to simply drag-and-drop images from them into a blog post like I can from Explorer/Finder/etc.

At first, I set this up as a one-way sync, “pushing” photos and videos from my phone to my desktop PC whenever I was on an unmetered WiFi network. But then I switched it to a two-way sync, enabling me to more-easily tidy up my phone of old photos too, by just dragging them from the folder that’s synced with my phone to my regular picture storage.

Centralising my backups

Now I’ve got a fancy NAS device with tonnes of storage, it makes sense to use it as a central point for backups to run fom. Instead of having many separate backup processes running on different computers, I can just have each of them sync to the NAS, and the NAS can back everything up. Computers don’t need to be “on” at a particular time because the NAS runs all the time, so backups can use the Internet connection when it’s quietest. And in the event of a hardware failure, there’s an up-to-date on-site backup in the first instance: the cloud backup’s only needed in the event of accidental data deletion (which could be sync’ed already, of course!). Plus, integrating the sync with ownCloud running on the NAS gives easy access to my files wherever in the world I am without having to fire up a VPN or otherwise remote-in to my house.

Plus: because Syncthing can share a folder between any number of devices, the same sharing mechanism that puts my phone’s photos onto my main desktop can simultaneously be pushing them to the NAS, providing redundant connections. And it was a doddle to set up.

Maintaining my media centre’s screensaver

Since the NAS, running Jellyfin, took on most of the media management jobs previously shared between desktop computers and the media centre computer, the household media centre’s had less to do. But one thing that it does, and that gets neglected, is showing a screensaver of family photos (when it’s not being used for anything else). Historically, we’ve maintained the photos in that collection via a shared network folder, but then you’ve got credential management and firewall issues to deal with, not to mention different file naming conventions by different people (and their devices).

But simply sharing the screensaver’s photo folder with the computer of anybody who wants to contribute photos means that it’s as easy as copying the picture to a particular place. It works on whatever device they care to (computer, tablet, mobile) on any operating system, and it’s quick and seamless. I’m just using it myself, for now, but I’ll be offering it to the rest of the family soon. It’s a trivial use-case, but once you’ve got it installed it just makes sense.

In short: this month, I’m in love with Syncthing. And maybe you should be, too.

Fox (Household NAS)

Last week I built Fox, the newest addition to our home network. Fox, whose specification called for not one, not two, not three but four 12 terabyte hard disk drives was built principally as a souped-up NAS device – a central place for us all to safely hold and control access to important files rather than having them spread across our various devices – but she’s got a lot more going on that that, too.

A black computer "cube" nestled under a desk, amongst cables. — Right now, Fox lives under my desk along with most of our network cables.

Fox has:

Enough hard drive space to give us 36TB of storage capacity plus 12TB of parity, allowing any one of the drives to fail without losing any data.
“Headroom” sufficient to double its capacity in the future without significant effort.
A mediumweight graphics card to assist with real-time transcoding, helping her to convert and stream audio and videos to our devices in whatever format they prefer.
A beefy processor and sufficient RAM to run a dozen virtual machines supporting a variety of functions like software development, media ripping and cataloguing, photo rescaling, reverse-proxying, and document scanning (a planned future purpose for Fox is to have a network-enabled scanner near our “in-trays” so that we can digitise and OCR all of our post and paperwork into a searchable, accessible, space-saving collection).

QFlix (media selection) menu showing on a TV — “QFlix” is a lot like Netflix, except geared mostly towards saving us from having to walk over to the DVD shelf or remember which disc we were up to when watching a long-running series. #firstworldproblems

The last time I filmed myself building a PC was when I built Cosmo, a couple of desktops ago. He turned out to be a bit of a nightmare: he was my first fully-watercooled computer and he leaked everywhere: by the time I’d done all the fixing and re-fixing to make him behave nicely, I wasn’t happy with the video footage and I never uploaded it. I’d been wary, almost-superstitious, about filming a build since then, but I shot a timelapse of Fox’s construction and it turned out pretty well: you can watch it below or on YouTube or QTube.

The timelapse slows to real-time, about a minute in, to illustrate a point about the component test I did with only a CPU (and cooler), PSU, and RAM attached. Something I routinely do when building computers but which I only recently discovered isn’t commonly practised is shown: that the easiest way to power on a computer without attaching a power switch is just to bridge the power switch pins using your screwdriver!

Fox is running Unraid, an operating system basically designed for exactly these kinds of purposes. I’ve been super-impressed by the ease-of-use and versatility of Unraid and I’d recommend it if you’ve got a similar NAS project in your future! I’d also like to sing the praises of the Fractal Design Node 804 case: it’s not got quite as many bells-and-whistles as some cases, but its dual-chamber design is spot-on for a multipurpose NAS, giving ample room for both full-sized expansion cards and heatsinks and lots of hard drives in a relatively compact space.