My zigbee-based IoT empire (mostly turning lights on and off) has historically involved a raspi running zigbee2mqtt, talking to the zigbee network via a CC2652R-based USB dongle called a zzh. Zigbee devices are presented on the mqtt message bus, and can thus be automated however one chooses.

Latterly the zzh has been repurposed as a bluetooth sniffer, so I needed a new TI chip to take over zigbee duties. Enter the OliZig POE. It’s built on an Olimex ESP32-POE, an ESP32 dev board with a PoE ethernet port. On top of this sits a daughter board which is basically the same thing as the zzh. The ESP32 presents the zigbee radio on a TCP socket, and zigbee2mqtt on the pi can connect to it over the LAN. This allows us to place the zigbee coordinator where it can get the best signal, while keeping the pi tucked out of the way.

It works great out of the box using the shipped firmware, with no need to change any settings or re-pair anything, two thumbs up. However we’re now in a situation where most of the work is still happening on the pi, and we’re using the powerful ESP32 SoC just to send the raw zigbee packets over the LAN to be processed by a bunch of javascript code in the form of zigbee2mqtt. Not very tidy. Surely the ESP32 could handle zigbee2mqtt’s job and process the packets locally? Enter tasmota.

Before christmas I finally installed the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model on my local machine. This post features my favourite images from a couple of afternoons spent playing around with it.

Click through to see them all, and a few thoughts on the AI art debate at the bottom - the page might load slowly if you’re not on decent wifi.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently playing through the Ocarina of Time PC port. Released March 2022, it’s accumulated a lot of nice enhancements as open source ports tend to do. It runs in 60fps with the viewport scaled to the resolution and aspect ratio of your choice. There’s a host of gameplay tweaks, and the option to use a freely orbiting camera controlled by the right analog stick, as seen in modern games.

During my playthrough I was pondering what enhancements of my own to add, and after vanquishing Ganon in 4k I decided the free camera would be most impactful thing I could improve.

Download MP3 | Download FLAC

1. Ana Roxanne - It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore
2. Ahmet Kaya - Uşşak Tevhid
3. Georgia - Bendires Trasher
4. Shackleton & Wacław Zimpel - Primal Drones
5. Hector Zazou - Etudes (Strates)
6. Samuel Organ - Second Skin
7. Ichiko Aoba - Horo
8. Oklou - Fall
9. Perila & Ulla - Leather Sofa
10. Unmode - Untitled
11. Jam City - Greenhouse (Day)
12. Kara-Lis Coverdale - Touch Me & Die
13. Seungmin Cha - 지금은 우리가 (Now, We Are)
14. 2562 - Winamp Melodrama
15. Unmode - Untitled
16. David Toop - Always she seemed to be listening to some foray in the blood, that had no known setting
17. 7038634357 - Sugar Armor
18. Gordon Hempton - Riverside quiet with insects, birds and rippling river in riparian zone
19. Sharp Veins - Tanzawa II
20. Flora Yin-Wing - Tirta Empul
21. Ben Salisbury & Suvi-Eeva Äikäs - Object Input
22. Unmode - Untitled
23. Cam Deas - Rhythmic Landscapes 2
24. Unmode - Untitled
25. MVRK - Possible Planets
26. Galen Tipton - Pillow Fight
27. Scott Gordon - Shake Mountain Chain
28. Shapednoise - What Is It Like?
29. Buunshin - All About This
30. Michael Speers - ορμή
31. Gabey Tjon A Tham - The Monads
32. Source Direct - Approach & Identify (Demdike Stare Cross Border Incursion Remix)

In the third part of this series on Netmaker/Wireguard for the home LAN, (part 1, part 2) let’s set up another wireguard network, featuring our external vps server which we’re going to use to browse the web from a different IP address to dodge ISP filtering, much as one might via a commerical VPN provider.