Welcome to Alex Blog
A tinkerer’s notebook since 2009. This is where I park the things I build, break, fix, and want to remember — from soldering sensors at 2 a.m. to chasing the perfect water-drop photo. If you like electronics, home automation, radio, photography, and a healthy dose of “let’s see if this works,” you’re in the right place.
It’s part blog, part archive, part lab journal. Some posts are years old, some are kept alive on purpose. Browse around — there’s a good chance something here sparks your next project.
Things I'm building now
- 🚗 TripChunker — an iOS app that plans road trips to an event by working backwards from your arrival date, splitting the drive into comfortable daily legs with overnight stops and cost estimates. Plan the destination, not the logistics.
- 🧩 SkillsManager — a native macOS app that pulls all your scattered AI-agent config files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, skills) into one place to edit, search, and manage.
What you’ll find here
⚡ Electronics & DIY hardware
Arduino, ESP8266, ATtiny, RFM12b radios, voltage regulators — built from scratch and documented honestly (mistakes included).
- The Photo Waterdrop Device — freeze a falling drop of water on camera
- SensorBox & My Sensors — wireless environment sensing
- 3.3V Voltage Regulator · Program an ATtiny with an Arduino
- 📂 Older builds live in the DIY Archive
🏠 Home automation (Domotica)
A setup that’s grown for over a decade — now running on Docker, Node-RED, InfluxDB, Grafana, HomeKit and more.
- DIY Domotica 2020 — my current Docker/Node-RED/Synology + Intel NUC stack
- Energy monitoring · Solar PV output metering
- Doorbell → smartphone notifications
📡 Radio & LoRaWAN
The Things Network, long-range mesh, and packet radio.
- Meshtastic — join the global off-grid mesh
- Build a TTN LoRaWAN node · DIY LoRaWAN gateway
- TTN Gateway upgrade to Stack v3
- 📻 Ham radio: HF Packet with the Yaesu FT-897
🖥️ IT, servers & monitoring
Synology, Raspberry Pi, Docker, backups, and keeping it all alive.
- No excuse for not having a backup + backup strategy
- Portainer on Synology · SSL certs on Synology
- Smokeping latency monitor · Open Monitoring Distribution
📸 Photography
Where the gear meets the light.
- Nikon DX lenses on a film SLR
- Water-drop photography (the reason that device exists)
🖨️ Making & misc
- Wanhao Di3 — Marlin firmware (3D printing)
- MQTT build-status light for DevOps
- Measure water usage · iBlue 747A+ GPS logger
Start here
- 📰 Latest write-ups → Articles
- 🗄️ The classics → DIY Archive
- 🔧 Current projects → Projects
A quick honesty note: I’m not as active as I once was, and some outdated posts have been retired. But everything still here earns its place — it either still works or still teaches something. Have fun poking around.
— Alexander