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Home Solar Project - Introduction

One of my projects I have been working on over the last two years, is adding solar panels to my house to offset some/most of my electrical usage.

Here are the goals I wish to accomplish, and how I plan on accomplishing them:

C# - Get Display Attribute Value from Enum

Every now and then, I have a use case where decorating an Enum’s values with Attributes comes in handy. Things such as… Adding Display Names, Descriptions, etc.

Well, every time I have this use-case, I have to go google how I did it the previous time… and in most cases, StackOverflow is less then helpful. Then, I remember a few personal projects where I previously did this, and I find the code and reuse it.

TFS / Azure Devops - Semantic Versioning

I publish nuget packages. Alot of nuget packages.

I don’t have time to maintain nuget package versioning, so, I automatically generate versions based on the date and build number, like so: 2022.07.14.1

As well, I need support for alpha/beta/etc.

So, 2022.07.14.1-alpha.

Here is my method of doing it-

Hidden door sensors

The default directions for installing doors sensors, involves using the included double-sized tape directly stick the sensor to doors and windows.

I personally, wanted these sensors to be out of sight, and out of mind. So, I decided to recess them into the doors themselves.

Home Assistant Alarm

So, you want to have an alarm for your house. But, you don’t want to give your money to ADT/Ring/SimpliSafe/etc… and you want to build it yourself, with components you can easily service and replace, right? If so, this is the article for you.

I have a few Reolink cameras. Recently, I noticed the time of many of the cameras was not set correctly.

Since, I keep all of my IOT and Security devices isolated from the internet, they are not able to communicate with the pre-defined external NTP server. However, I do have a NTP server running on my opnsense firewall which they do have access to.

But, it appears the ability to set a custom NTP server no longer exists in the reolink’s configuration page.

Home Assistant – Programmable Thermostat GUI – Part 2

A while back, after converting my primary thermostat over to z-wave, I found a creative way of managing my thermostat’s schedules using the scheduler-card.

Well, I recently installed a new mini-split for my bedroom/office, and needed to integrate and maintain my schedules via home assistant. So, I decided to redo my schedules a bit.

I found the scheduler-card has a “make-scheme” button, which is far more intuitive for creating schedules then what I put together in PART 1. In hindsight, this feature existed then as well…

Adding "Bifurcation" to a Dell R720XD

Wait, the R720XD doesn’t support bifurcation?

And- you would be correct by saying that.

However- There are special PCIe cards you can acquire, which will perform the bifurcation.

Credit for this idea goes to THIS POST which was brought to my attention by a fellow redditor. (I couldn’t find the comment from a month ago..)

As a note- this isn't specific to the R720XD, this guide/hardware should work in any hardware with the proper PCIe slots, which does not support bifurcation out of the box.