Wednesday, December 23, 2015

AMAZON Dash
 
Well, I just received a couple of these nifty devices from Amazon.

Being in Canada, it's basically useless right now but I have a lot of ideas on what we can do with these medicine tablet size devices.

The Dash has a basic ARM processor and WIFI connectivity, and once you set it up on your mobile device thru the Amazon app, depending on what product you set it up to buy from Amazon, every time you push the button it will connect to your WIFI router, submit the command thru Amazon (log a purchase) and then turns itself off to save power.
 
Now, if you didn't set up a product for purchase in your Amazon App, it will basically just connect to your WIFI router, and then disconnect.
 
With this behavior, we can create a monitoring app (ARP Probe), which just detects if Amazon Dash  connects to the WIFI router, and then based on this, trigger an action.
 
Here are some of possible applications the Dash can be used for with IFTTT:
 
1. Doorbell  - Push the button, trigger a notification on all the iPads, android machines
2. Door Opener - Push a button, opens a zwave door lock
3. Picture taker - Push a button, grabs a snapshot from my webcam running on the dockstar and email it
4. Light switch - Push button, turn on a zwave light (no need to grab phone, open app, turn on)
5. Garage door opener - Open the garage from living room (might be a security risk)
6. Data logger - Push a button everytime you drink medicine, post it to a spreadsheet so you'll track it.
7. Self Destruct - For the paranoid people out there, a self destruct switch, which turns on wemo/zwave switch that turns on an electromagnet besides your hard drive.
8. etc.
 
The common denominator would be is that you'd need an always on machine, like a Raspberry Pi, Dockstar, Openwrt router, Smartthings, file server PC, etc.  that is running Linux or Windows and when the button is pressed, a monitoring program will detect the MAC address of the Dash, depending on what triggers you have setup in IFTTT (example: file created in Dropbox, send an email to IFTTT, etc.) and when IFTTT detects that, it will then generate a subsequent action like turn on the light (via Wemo, Smarthings, Hue), Post a facebook/instagram/twitter message, and lots of other actions.
 
Stay tune for number 3, I'm planning on having the Amazon Dash post a screen cap from my dockstar's mjpg-streamer automatically to either my FB acct or instagram whenever I push the button.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

My 22TB RAID file server

Sans Digital 8 Bay eSATA Enclosure

My GoFlex Net 22TB NAS




I've been meaning to write up my experiences in creating my cheap 24TB GoFlex Net setup, but I haven't found the time until now.

Now, I've been buying 3TB drives when they were on sale for years now, whenever it goes below $100, I bought one each time, and was planning on just plugging it in my Pogoplug or a desktop HTPC so I can have my file collections accessible online.

Eventually, I was able to buy an 8-bay eSATA enclosure from Amazon.ca for around $160 which was quite cheap compared to the regular price of over $300... It had two eSATA connectors, and the card that came with it supports RAID setups, which I opted not to use.

I have 4 3TB drives and 4 2TB drives installed  in it, totaling 18TB and was using my HTPC as the network server for my iPads, Androids, XBMC, WDTV, XIOS, etc. and it was ok for a while...

However, having a 300W PC server, is a bit excessive as all I really needed was a fileserver, and I looked for a more energy efficient option.I shopped around for any 4 or 8-bay NAS and was surprised it costs more than what a PC is worth and appalled that an 8-bay NAS with no Disk costs more than a thousand dollars, and probably powered by a so-so processor that even the slowest Celeron PC can run around circles with.


I looked at Cubieboards (1 SATA port), Raspberry Pis (USB only), Beaglebone Blacks (USB) and even Cubox-i4Pro (1 eSATA port) and only the Cubox-i4Pro would probably be able to handle the 8 drives, but it would involve splitting the single eSATA port to two SATA connectors, which would in-turn split into 4 drives each, and I'm wary that a single SATA bus would be able to handle it.


Then I found out about the Seagate GoFlex Net, 
Seagate GoFlex Net







which was an fork of the Pogoplug, it supports two SATA drives, and more importantly those SATA bus supports Port Multiplier, allowing me to use my 8-bay enclosure.



The GoFlex Net is now discontinued, as the Pogoplug Cloud didn't really take off, but it is hackable to install Linux on it. My first try was to use Arch Linux, but Debian has a number of fairly good packages I switched to Debian instead and installed Open Media Vault.


I will be discussing later on how I was able to install Debian on the GoFlex Net and the uBoot settings I had to configure for it to be able to boot from the first drive (freeing up the lone USB port) and how I soldered an external power connector (which I took from an old internal fan connector) so I can power the GoFlexnet from the enclosure power supply.


But just to show you it is doable, here's a couple of pictures of the GoFlex Net mounted inside the 8-bay enclosure, thereby giving me a cheap 8-bay NAS. I've accumulated more than 8 3TB drives, so I was planning on installing all of them to have 24TB, but I had problems booting on the 3TB drive due to the Linux's limitation. I was able to boot off a 3TB on my Seagate GoFlex Home (which is a 1 SATA Pogoplug clone), but I was having a hard time to do in on the GoFlexNet, so I opted to just use a 2TB drive for my first two drives in the enclosure... I was planning on setting up RAID on the first two drives and then another RAID for the rest of the 3TB drives, but in the end I just set them all up as independent drives (Disk 1 to 8) and just use RSYNC to back up the important files (which are just pictures, home movies, etc)... Hence I have 22TB  of storage accessible...







GoFlex Net inside the eSATA enclosure


Plugged the SATA cables directly to the GoFlex Net