2018 on Ricky Moorhouse

Bee visitors

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here are a few of the bees that have visited our garden so far this weekend:

Raspberry Pi Weather Station

Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For a while I've been meaning to write up the details of the Raspberry Pi weather station that I have built with my eldest daughter. This project builds on a number of examples I've seen across the internet, particularly sensing the weather. This details how our system is put together.

Temperature monitoring

We took two temperature sensors and mounted them in a garden post with one pushed down to the bottom for soil temperature and one in the cap for the air temperature. The one-wire sensors can share the same three wires, so are both connected to a wire leading back to the Raspberry Pi through a hole drilled into the side of the post. For waterproofing we surrounded the whole with hot glue. The post is situated in a shady spot and pushed about 30 centimeters deep in the soil.

Places Visited Map

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For a while I've had a variation on my map of the places I've visited - here's a summary of how my current version is working.

The whole site is currently generated by hugo, a static site generator with no server side component. The map is powered by MapBox GL which lets me choose any of the mapbox styles to use for my map. I create a markdown file for each place on the map, with the latitude and longitude in the 'front matter' for the post which looks something like this:

Introducing hem

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

hem is a synthetic monitoring tool which monitors HTTP resources on a regular schedule, storing details of the time taken and the reponse code returned.

I've been using Uptime at work for a while for endpoint monitoring and over the time we've been using it made a few tweaks or plugins for it - in particular being able to send metrics from Uptime to Graphite. There were also some more substantial changes we were considering making and we'd built up a number of supporting scripts to populate the checks via the Uptime API when hosts changed. We also have all our other monitoring dashboards in Grafana. In this context I decided that what would be nice is a simple tool that could replace the checking piece and feed that data into our graphite data store to be viewed and alerted on from Grafana.

Reducing our plastic use

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 14:30:00 +0000

Over the last few months we've started to try and reduce our use of plastics - especially single use plastics. Here are some of the areas where we've made changes.

View API Error detail

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:21:00 +0100

To view the details of the steps in an API in Analytics to assist in debugging you can do the following: