You might actually want to consider a DJI Power 500 or 1000. They’re actually portable power banks but can supposedly work in UPS mode, and will run for WAY longer than a traditional lead-acid battery UPS. See also Ecoflow’s options.

They’re a lot better than that where I live.

Still the best option, huh?

As someone else said, it’s mainly so I can ask couriers to leave packages in specific places, tell salespersons to go away without getting up, etc.

This one. Especially if I am not home.

That’s an interesting solution. However I don’t need this. I basically want a video intercom with whoever’s at the door.

Maybe I’ll look into electronic locks later, I guess. It’s not really a priority.

That’s the one :)

Whenever I read something on the lines of X`s new Y, I think of Curt’s new hat.

No problem! To expand further, I am 99% certain it would be perfectly viable to have a single disk volume group and just take advantage of LVM’s ability to create, resize and delete virtual partitions on the fly. I think you could also put all your disks into a single volume group, then ask it to not spread your logical volumes across multiple disks, if you wanted to. Could get a bit fiddly though.

You are correct, LVM combines 1 or more disks into 1 or more storage pools that can then be allocated out to logical volumes as needed.

If you just up and pull a disk from a pool (volume group), you’re gonna have a bad time. You can, however, migrate the “extents” allocated to that physical disk to another in order to replace the disk, and your logical volumes can be set up with RAID-like redundancy. There’s a lot of options on how to manage it.

IMO you should use LVM2 or one of the high level filesystems that have similar features, and then dynamically create partitions and mount them as needed. E.g. Suddenly need 50G for a new VM image? Make a partition and mount it where you need the space.

Whichever you prefer. There is no correct way.

Mm, that could be a problem for the battery even if it does connect. You could probably work around it if you really wanted to; solar powered repeater high up somewhere between the box and the house. But that’s getting into silly territory. :P

Next time you’re out there see what signal you get from your phone, maybe? Just hold it away from your car.

Awesome, gonna bookmark those for later. Thanks!

No problem. The one I used is an ESP32 DevKitC, and you can find info about it on Espressif’s site, or just google the pinout diagram. For basic tasks it should be all you need since it has lots of binary pins, two ADC channels, two DAC channels, realtime clock, special pins for waking it from deep sleep, two I2C, etc. Though if you want to do video input you probably want something else, I’m learning.

Anyway, if you can spare the money to get one just to toy with I’d definitely recommend it.

Yeah, all it does is tell me when something is obscuring one of the sensors. I figure anything that gers put in there which is small enough to fall in a way it covers neither isn’t going to be important enough to worry about.

I am vaguely aware AusPost has some kind of service that might inform me of regular mail delivery, but anyone can put stuff in my mailbox not just AusPost. Plus this was a fun project, yeah.

Okay so that is an issue with the ESP32, sure. There are a lot of variants.

So from what I can tell, the ESP32 is the SoC chip and what you usually get is a dev board which has that plus a bunch of power regulation bits, a USB connector and UART so you can easily program it, etc. That part varies mostly by pinout. I.e. Same features, different pin location.

There are also variants of the chip, but those are usually more costly and will be named things like ESP32-S2.

Every one I’ve seen can run off 5v or 3.3v and uses the latter for logic, so if you got yourself an arduino kit and then just bought an ESP32 dev board it would almost certainly work with whatever is in the kit. Both are microcontrollers, not microprocessors, so they tend not to have OSes or screens.

Yeah, of course. :)

Oh interesting. Can you link the detector? I could use that for something else.