Oiled windows

 All wooden windows coated outside with linseed oil mix.

10 hours

1L linseed,  200ml turpentine 30ml siccatif

Bosch fridge freezer KGV33VL30S

Completely dead fridge. No interior light, nothing on the control panel.

To remove the panel slide a screwdriver in from each end and push the clip.

LNK304 had failed + R36 fusible resistor 22R

Replaced with LNK306. Didnt have anything close to 22R fusible, so used 315mA Fast + 22R = 26R combined. Measured 0.06V across both.

Didnt trace the circuit, but looks like a 5V output and a doubler to 9.5V

9V relay controls the compressor. 

There is a hall effect sensor by the LEDs which is used to control the interior light. If you don't install the unit, the light stays on for a bit, then goes off.

Cant be sure what each connectors does. Mains in (live via switch) has a black which switches live to the compressor.

Grey is probably for the seal heater. Looks like this is switched via a transistor.

Window winders

The security blinds have winding handles on the inside. The highest elbow fails randomly. It's a cast aluminium part. You can't buy the broken bit, or at least I can't find it. 

The main pole is 12.4mm OD, 9.3mm ID. 

I found 2 handles that fit. 

Part no SMF321A is marginally cheaper (10€) and is fully aluminium. I've fitted that in the bedroom where it will be used a lot, but on a small blind. 

Part no SMF301A is practically identical (10.70€) and is steel except for the same alu casting to the pole. 3 of these were fitted to the largest blinds. The remaining 3 are original and in the remaining bedrooms.

Intel NUC11

Learning about proxmox and the like I decided to buy an Intel NUC. The NUC11TNHi3, sometimes labelled pro. Series 11 i31115G4@3GHz. Not a slouch. About twice the speed of a Raspberry pi 5. Prices are very variable. I got this one wwith 4GB or DDR4 and 128G SSD for 80€. I then spent another 40€ on used 16G of Samsung 3200 M471A2K43EB1-CWE RAM and 90€ on a used 1TB Samsung MZVL21T00 (PCIe 4.0 x4 Samsung 980 Pro) SSD (75%) which is fair for this year (August 2026) Bought similar 13 months ago new for 70€ each...

The mobo spec didnt call for DDR4/3200, but the existing 4G was so it seemed a good idea to match it. The manual was silent on whether the 16 + 4G would play nice, but they did. Now 20G. My RPI5 is 8G RAM and it's got 6G used. I felt 16G was the minimum and had I known the memory would stack, then I'd have gone for +8G to give 12G and saved ~20€.

The best find for me though, was the B-key 2242 slot. Marked SATA, the manual is a bit vague. I found 1 post for a NUC13 where someone had put a NVME PCIe3x2 key B+M. I already had an old WD SN520 256G 2280. I'd put proxmox on this and it was in the main (NVME) slot. 

The B-key basically (physically removes) cuts out 2 lanes of PCI of 4. The mobo manual says the sata socket has a single lane. I knew that my PI5 would not boot off this WD SN520 which has 1 lane too, but the PI5 is very picky. I reckoned it would work in the slot, but it's 80mm, the slot being 42mm. In researching that I'd come across a post where someone had cut down a SN520 for their Thinkpad. I decided to give it a try and cut it down. Worst case I'd have a shorter working drive. 

I wrapped it up in masking tape, measured a line at 42mm, drilled a 3.5 mm hole, and did a good deep score each side. I gently snapped in and used a knife + file to remove the burrs. The edge was not clean PCB. It actually looked like one side was a thicker heatsink, but it wasn't. I put it into a usb to NVME adapter just in case it has some shorts, but it was fine. It shows as NVME, but I can't see how many lanes. Between 1 and 2. Proxmox booted as normal and I configured the 1TB.

Avosdims fly screens

Decided to buy the 'Luxe' screens as they can be provided cut to size. I reckon it takes an hour to cut down a blind, so the 10€ charge is reasonable. Sadly, it adds 2 weeks to an already too long 1 week time to send them. Seriously? It takes you a week to take a stock item off the shelf and put it in a box?? I could understand this at peak mosi season, but in spring??

Box arrived open with the blinds sloshing around. Very sturdy carboard, just not enough bands. Or packing material.

Swarf everywhere, and paint scratched and worn.

Insturction incorrect. Torx T27. WTF who was T27. Turns out they meant posi. 4.5mm HEX. Now that is bizzare. I've over 10 sets of allen keys, plus socket sets. None had that size. Imperial not close either. Jammed a screwdiver in. Must be a common size in China.

Instructions did not cover how to assemble a pre-cut blind. It assumed you were cutting it down.

Avosdims have clearly never fitted their blinds on a real window. Window sill slope. They have to slope else rain will invariably run towards the house. On this 'Luxe' design there is a shitty plastic clip to hold the blind down. This shitty clip is on the outer edge and relies on pressing hard onto the sill. This wont happen on a real window sill. Ended up putting a bold through.

1 window has a nearly flat plastic sill. The shitty clip is nicely compressed. However, the crap design means it's really really difficult to unclip. Arthritis anyone. Don't even try to open them.

The cheap blinds put a much better clip on the inside edge and are much easier to use.

Will I buy again. Probably. I'll order the drop length +5mm and re-cut it to suit the sill, or maybe the cheap one. Avodims are the cheapest by a long way, so take your pick.

Reolink doorbell

I've had a doorbell on the gates for years. So long that the hedge that wasn't there now grows over it. The same goes for the gates orange warning beacon.

Long story short. Bought a Reolink D340W. Ethernet or wifi. Wifi will never work - just too far.

Moved the doorbell to the other pillar, and the beacon to the other side of the existing pillar. Took a bit of effort to get the cat5 across as a lizard had died in the conduit which took a bit of luck to get out.

The 868MHz link just works to the house for the separate chime, but HASS integrates the doorbell, so I can trap the button press if needed.

Changes needed

1. Remove 5V psu for old camera and connect to gates +14V IR beam supply via 250mA fuse.

2. Add 24V supply in place of the 18V supply that fed the gates supply

3. mains delay PCB now fed from IR beam 14V via 270R resistor (used to be 5v)

4. beam broken & gates open sensors now send 14V to house instead of 5V

Circuit is with gate manual

Bosch Ixo

Pretty old, bought around 2009. Battery is a Sony 1.3Ah/20A. As of today it's at 0/6Ah.  Replaced with a 3Ah, 20A Pile Rechargeable 18650 INR18650-25P DMEGC Li-ion 3,7V 2500mAh 20A from Bestpiles.

All fall down

Capvern les Bains, 65130. The end wall of the old Salon de thé fell away. It had a tarp covering the roof for quite some time.

Rat on a wall

 I've seen a rat around the outside of the house, and on the shed roof, but it then disappeared. Turns out they have strong enough claws to walk on walls.

siplec enrouleur automatique

 Bought this a good few years ago when Leclerc had it on offer.

Good enough, but recently it's not been winding back the last metre.

Rip out all the screws on this side. You can leave the black cover in place.

Carefully remove the screw under the rear sticker about half way. Balance it on securely on some wood chocks. Working from the front, it should just come off. If not keep undoing the rear screw a turn at a time. 

With it now open, keep pressure on the black cable reel. Turn the case, ACW holding the reel a until the cable block gets to the case, then add a couple of turns. Reassemble.

It wont matter if the black reel does come away - the spring will just pop out quite safely. But now you'll need to rewind it all. It can be tricky holding the tensioned reel in place and refitting the top. In that case remove the black cover and small centre screw. Then feed the cables through, place the slip ring north/south and refit the cover, passing the cables back through and matching up the square peg of the slip rings.

Sold the bikes

 After over 20 years of riding, we sold the bikes. It's not that we'll stop riding, it's just that we've barely ridden them in 2 years. Too hot, too cold, too many other things to do that we are enjoying more.

Received the money 27/4/26

Last seen at the dealer 😘

New HIFI project

I have a JVC cross media system that I bought in the mid 80s. It's slowly less relevant, and being old-school there is no remote! I started modifying the tuner to control the rest, but most radio stations are now streamed....

Found an old satellite TV STB and gutted it. A good compact size.

Before (mains lead removed)

The finished item. A bit of filler in the holes, primer and black top coat. 2 rotary encoders for main volume and sub volume. A RGB LED is green for on and slow blue flash for 'off' 

Server software is Lyrion Music Server.

2.1 amp. TAS5805. There are 2 chips stacked on the right hand side purple boards. Small board is a 3V3 psu which uses about 0.1W standby. A relay turns on the amp supply/external subwoofer. 

Power supply is an old laptop 19V 3A / 60W Took the top off for cooling, plus I wanted it earth free output. It means the metal emissions cage is missing. There's a built in Y cap which the cage shorted out, so this supply would appear to be approved for use in countries with earth free outlets. It's plenty to drive both chips.

A separate mains output for a subwoofer. It's a 50W 8R amp and cone. The TAS wont drive it hard enough, but I use the TAS loudspeaker output to drive the sub pre-amp. It's a nice 150Hz LPF output from the TAS. I could have used the i2s output to drive another DAC at line level, but let's be honest. It's a bass driver and a bit of HF/PWM noise from the D class TAS ain't going to be noticeable in a domestic setting.

Separate IR receiver as this project will be in a cupboard, and the receiver can hang outside. The range is over 10m. The remote is a random Philips RC5 one I was given that does more or less what I want and is easily configured on the server.

Software is heavily modified squeezlite-esp32 to give control to both TAS. TAS control software comes from here https://github.com/sonocotta/esp32-tas5805m-dac/tree/main

Hail

 Hail storm today 28/4/26 at 16h30

Rain works out to around 48mm/hour

Bosch series 4 washing machine remove paddle

How to remove the paddle/aerator on a Bosch series 4 washing machine.

There are lots of videos, but none show where the clip is. It's probably the same paddle design on a lot of these Bosch machines.

You can see the tab that needs lifting towards the bottom of the left photo. In the other photo, insert the screwdriver through the hole, under the tab arm and push down towards the drum. You're aiming to lift the arm.  Not too much. Then slide the paddle towards the front.

The access below the paddle is just enough to get a small pair of pliers through to the outer, and pick out bits of wire etc. Otherwise you'll need to pull the heating element.

For info, the heating element is fitted from the rear. If you look carefully through the drum you can see it stops about 10cm from the front.

Corona Mill for Crushing Brewing Grain

There is another post where I tried to make a mill out of beech. Beech wasn't hard enough.

I got a Corona mill in the end. It takes a while to crush 7kg of grain, so the temptation is to use a drill. You need a lot of torque and slow speed. My Dewalt drill will do it, but the shaft is wonky.

I had an old bread maker. Taking that apart gave some great parts to re-use. I have cheated and use a variac to slow the motor down, but it works well.

Weird behaviour Asus AX-82U

I've got a mesh network of a AX-82 and AX-53. It's been running about a year. AX53 is stock, AX82 runs gnuton/asuswrt-merlin. Basically flawless until the last few months. At seemingly random intervals the network will dump wireless clients running Espressif chips (ESP32 & ESP8266), plus a Samsung oven (MAC not Espressif) . The oven is isolated from the ESP clients (different SSID) and the ESP devices are shared across 2 x SSID. The clients will stay off the network for up to 15 minutes. It was most noticeable as MQTT (a raspberry pi) would drop out sometimes. I was logging on some ESP devices and they only showed a loss of MQTT. I run Uptime Kuma and that pings all my IOT every minute. This showed the ESP devices being dumped and re-connected. MQTT was never dumped.

I thought I'd isolated it to a home assistant/open Beken Tuya BK7231N/CBS3 in a temperature sensor, but the problem continued for months. I'd forgotten about a door sensor that is infrequently used. Same tuya chip. If either device associates with the AX82, it dumps most ESP devices off the network. If they associate with the AX53 there is normally not a problem - just had the Tuya associate with the AX53 and a nearby device associated with the AX82 was dumped. Go figure.

These are battery devices with fresh batteries, running in sleep mode.

I've changed so many router settings I've almost lost track

I've a few smart plugs which had various Tuya devices, but 1 failed and I'd already replaced the others with pin compatible ESP8266, so no issues found there. Except I have to specify 

WiFi.setPhyMode(WIFI_PHY_MODE_11G);

in the ESPHOME yaml or the connection is random with the AX82. No problem with the AX53.

For info

All the devices compile in Platformio, using  Arduino.  As a general rule, all the ESP are V2 Arduino/ pre 6.10.0 PIO. I've got other ESP which aren't booted off, but the majority are. Some are 802.11n, some g, some b.

The door sensor (with AX82) only crashes the network when the door is closed.

Router log - shed door is the door sensor

Jul 27 10:59:49 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(685): wl0.1: Auth SHED DOOR, status: Successful (0), rssi:0

Jul 27 10:59:49 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(722): wl0.1: Assoc SHED DOOR, status: Successful (0), rssi:-78

Jul 27 11:01:00 kernel: WEATHER STATION  not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:01:00 kernel: OVEN ] not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:01:00 kernel: SHED DOOR not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind WEATHER STATION , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-77

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind CPI2 , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-76

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.1: Deauth_ind SHED DOOR, status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-78

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind IOTAWATT , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-40

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.1: Deauth_ind SUNNYBOY , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-62

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.1: Deauth_ind BEDROOM-CLOCK [, status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-72

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.3: Deauth_ind OVEN ], status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:0

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.3: Deauth_ind OVEN ], status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:0

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind WEATHER STATION , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-77

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind CPI2 , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-76

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): eth5: Deauth_ind IOTAWATT , status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-40

Jul 27 11:01:10 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.1: Deauth_ind SHED DOOR, status: 0, reason: Previous authentication no longer valid (2), rssi:-78

A later log for the temperature sensor doesnt show the ESP devices being dumped

Jul 27 11:17:34 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(685): wl0.1: Auth TEMPERATURE SENSOR 1 , status: Successful (0), rssi:0

Jul 27 11:17:34 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(722): wl0.1: Assoc TEMPERATURE SENSOR 1 , status: Successful (0), rssi:-75

Jul 27 11:17:38 kernel: MQTT IP is used by someone else, can't use it

Jul 27 11:17:53 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(645): wl0.1: Deauth_ind TEMPERATURE SENSOR 1 , status: 0, reason: Unspecified reason (1), rssi:-73

Jul 27 11:17:53 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(685): wl0.1: Auth TEMPERATURE SENSOR 1 , status: Successful (0), rssi:-73

Jul 27 11:17:53 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(722): wl0.1: Assoc TEMPERATURE SENSOR 1 , status: Successful (0), rssi:-73

Jul 27 11:19:02 kernel: WEATHER STATION  not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:19:02 kernel: OVEN ] not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:20:04 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(662): wl0.1: Disassoc STUDY_RADIO , status: 0, reason: Disassociated because sending station is leaving (or has left) BSS (8), rssi:0

Jul 27 11:20:04 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(662): wl0.1: Disassoc STUDY_RADIO , status: 0, reason: Disassociated because sending station is leaving (or has left) BSS (8), rssi:0

Jul 27 11:20:07 kernel: MQTT IP is used by someone else, can't use it

Jul 27 11:20:32 kernel: AC  not mesh client, can't delete it

Jul 27 11:20:32 kernel: MQTT (PI5 wifi)  not mesh client, can't delete it

Asus Zeneye camera

This is one of very few posts that exist for these cameras. I guess they were never very popular. I paid 25€ 6 months ago for a working set of 2, with base. They work fine, battery life is good. They are waterproof. Or at least they are until they are dropped. I'm guessing mine was dropped as 2 internal mounting pillars are broken, meaning the screws with O-rings no longer sealed to the PCB.

Long story short, I drowned a camera. It was foolish on my part. I put the camera upside down in a gutter. It worked fine for a few days and I've plenty of footage with the camera submerged.

It's now in pieces to dry out.

The disassembly starts with a T6 in the base mounting hole. This reveals a removable outer shell (non-lens side, which is fixed) Careful unclip and remove this. Now remove all the 000 screws and off pops the case; to fully separate carefully jiggle the small pcb (bottom photo middle left) which will readily come loose.

Leave in the airing cupboard a few days and re-assemble. I should probably wash it in IPA or ethanol, but it was clean rain water.

X capacitor goes bang

A large bang and an awful smell. X capacitor in an extension block.

Quite a mess to clean up as it leaked into the base. At least it didn't go pop into a PSU with a fan.

WD SN520 NVME raspberry pi

 As reported widely, WD drives are avoided for RPI 5. The WD SN520 NVME raspberry pi does not work. A few photos in case anyone finds a driver for the Sandisk controller

Whatsapp transfer

 tldr; I messed up the transfer of messages to my new phone. However, it worked out fine.

The mistake I made; that the backup on google was up to date. It was a day old. What I'd forgotten that I'd done a lot of messaging that day. So I'd moved the SIM to the new phone, started whatsapp and accepted a restore from google. This was a few hours out of date.

Googling suggested lots of ways to now move the data including 'tough, too late'

Logically, all the messages were still on the old phone. Leaving the sim in the new phone, I removed whatsapp (didnt keep old data), then re-installed, but didn't open it. All this lost was a local database. There is still a backup on google. On the old phone I opened whatsapp and set it up with the old phone number. Then I followed the instructions here https://faq.whatsapp.com/209942271778103/?cms_platform=android which basically tell you to goto settings/chats/transfer chats ie follow the instructions for a normal transfer (which you should have done originally, muppet) You are guided from there, but in short, once the old phone is setup, open WA in new phone and accept the transfer from the old phone, scan a QR code shown on the new phone.

What didnt work. On the old phone, registered to my number (no sim) do a back up. It was over 24 hours since the last one, and it said it was working, but the backup date never changed. When restoring to the new phone, I was missing messages.