Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Wyze Cam vs. Xiamoi-Dafang Hacks

The Wyze Cam is a surprisingly inexpensive camera firmly lashed to the Wyze app, with no provision for ordinary IP camera streaming. It seems to be a generic camera with custom firmware and, unsurprisingly, one can commandeer the bootloader with different firmware from a MicroSD card, thereby adding missing functions and suppressing undesired actions.

Oddly, buying a genuine Wyze Cam directly from Wyze isn’t significantly more expensive than a generic from the usual eBay / Amazon sellers. Bonus: the legit camera arrives next week rather than in a month or two.

I found one of my few remaining 2 GB MicroSD cards, formatted it with a 512 MB (!) FAT32 partition (per the suggestions), set up the “custom firmware” bootloader, and installed it with no issues.

Installing the new firmware requires copying a directory tree, configuring the WiFi SSID and password in the usual wpa_supplicant, and rebooting. Works fine and, yeah, the camera now runs Linux.

I told the router to assign a known IP address to the camera’s MAC address, set up port forwarding for port 8554 to that IP address, put the camera against the storm window in the kitchen, and rebooted everything to get it working:

Wyze Cam in kitchen window

Unfortunately, while it works more-or-less well with browsers on the local network, it’s apparently inaccessible from outside. The router manages a DDNS name-to-IP mapping to make itself findable, the port is open, the forwarding seems correct, no image data arrives to browsers outside, and they eventually time out.

Changing to port 8080 doesn’t help, nor does using MJPEG instead of H264 encoding.

Even more unfortunately, the router doesn’t do hairpin connections (inside to outside to inside), so I can’t debug this mess from the Comfy Chair.

This is a placeholder for what I’ve done while I accumulate more knowledge …

2018-09-27
Garden Hose Y-Valve Autopsy

One of the handles snapped off a Y valve at the garden and I finally got around to an autopsy:

Garden Y Valve – cross sectioned

That’s using a 24 tpi bandsaw blade, which doesn’t cut nearly as smoothly as a fancy diamond saw, but seems good enough for the purpose. Most of the ripply shading on the cut plane comes from specular reflections; it’s pot metal all the way through and cuts to a high shine.

A closeup shows more detail around the (now hemispheric) ball valve:

Garden Y Valve – thread detail

You can see faint straight lines just inside the hose threads, which gives a hint of what’s to come.

Pry out the sectioned ball and dislodge the O-ring from the now-obvious insert:

Garden Y Valve – O-rings

Gently squish the threads in the bench vise to pop out the insert:

Garden Y Valve – plug removed

If lives depended on it, one could dismantle and repair the valve without recourse to a bandsaw, but …

2018-09-26
Bathroom Drawer Knob: Whoopsie!

I managed to snag a cargo pocket on the under-sink drawer knob in the Black Bathroom:

Bathroom knob – bent screw

Did a job on the pocket, too, although after Mary was done with it, you’d never know.

With that much of a bend in the screw, the knob left a nasty divot in the drawer front requiring a layer of wood-filled epoxy:

Bathroom knob – filled divot

I sanded it more-or-less flush with the surface, taking great pains to not scuff the surrounding paint. A similar layer fills the corresponding divot under the screw head inside the front.

Despite appearances, only about 1/8 inch of the epoxy peeked around the knob, so I painted it black with a Sharpie, ran the knob onto the screw, and declared victory:

Bathroom knob – restored

I’ll (try to) (remember to) stand further back from the knob …

2018-09-23
Miniblind Roller Repair

The rod along the left side of our miniblinds turns a shaft spanning the length of the housing which pulls-and-releases three pairs of cords tilting the blades, with one roller for each pair. The cords loop over, pass under, and are secured to a tab on the roller with metal ferrules, thusly:

Miniblind roller – intact

One day, the middle section of all the blades on one miniblind stopped tilting, prompting this discovery:

Miniblind roller – broken tab

The correct solution is, of course, to replace the entire miniblind, but our 1955 window frames don’t match up well with contemporary miniblind hardware and I was unwilling to reinvent that particular wheel for this occasion.

So I laid the cords in place, put the broken tab atop them, and held the mess together with a strip of the obligatory Kapton tape:

Miniblind roller – repositioned tab

Easing some epoxy under the tab and soaking the cords atop the tape held everything together in approximately the original layout:

Miniblind roller – epoxy backfill

Two days after I reinstalled the miniblind, a second roller broke and was restored by a similar treatment. While I had the thing ~~on the bench~~ clamped in the bench vise, I preemptively slobbered epoxy on the intact roller in the hope of reinforcing it.

So far, so good!

2018-09-19
Amazon Product Puzzlement
Amazon’s top three offerings for American Standard 023529-0070A:

Amazon – American Standard Faucet Valves

They’re all “by American Standard”, but you must check each item to discover where it’s coming from:
- “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com”
- “Ships from and sold by Gatzies“
- “Ships from and sold by moneyworldstore“
Although I’ve done my fair share of repairs to this faucet, I don’t need a cartridge every month and, in any event, signing up for Subscribe & Save doesn’t promise much in the way of savings.

The second listing has the best price by a small margin. I’m content to pay half a buck more to have Amazon handle the entire transaction, rather than deal with some random Amazon Marketplace vendor.

The third listing seems to be a bizarre algorithmically priced corner case, a no-stock placeholder, or a money-laundering scheme. Judging from the pricing of other “moneyworldstore” offerings, their business model doesn’t include retail sales.

So much weirdness from one simple item …
2018-09-14

Fireball Island Figures

A cousin asked if my 3D printer could replace some figures gone missing from their old Fireball Island game board, a classic apparently coming out in a new & improved version.

Fortunately, solid models exist on Thingiverse:

Fireball Island figure - Thingiverse 536867 — Fireball Island figure – Thingiverse 536867

Unfortunately, the left arm requires support, which Slic3r supplies with great exuberance:

Fireball Island figure - Slic3r support — Fireball Island figure – Slic3r support

The vast tower on the figure’s right side (our left) seemed completely unnecessary, not to mention I have no enthusiasm for the peril inherent in chopping away so much plastic, so I replaced it with a simple in-model pillar:

The pillar leans from an adhesion-enhancing lily pad and ends one layer below the left hand, with all dimensions and angles chosen on the fly to make the answer come out right.

Works like a champ:

Fireball Island Figures - orange - on platform — Fireball Island Figures – orange – on platform

The dark band down the middle comes from the Pixel’s shutter.

They emerged with some PETG hair, the removal of which I left as an end-user experience.

I mailed a small box containing figures printed in my (limited!) palette of four colors, some spares Just In Case™, and a few QC rejects showing the necessity of lily pads.

Game on!

The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:

	// Adding support under Fireball Island figure arm

	import("/mnt/bulkdata/Project Files/Thing-O-Matic/Fireball Island/Fireball Island figure – 100k.stl", convexity=5);

	translate([6.5,-4.0,0]) {
	intersection(){
	translate([-10/2,-10/2,0])
	cube([10,10,11.6],center=false);
	rotate([0,-5.0,0])
	rotate(180/6)
	cylinder(d=4.0,h=30,$fn=6,center=true);
	}

	translate([8/4,0,0])
	rotate(180/6)
	cylinder(d=8,h=0.2,$fn=6);
	}

view raw Figure Support Mods.scad hosted with ❤ by GitHub

2018-09-11

Frayed Power Drop

The neutral conductor is down to its last three strands:

Damaged neutral – over Redondo near pole 62859

Perhaps the power drop got snagged twice, because there’s a splice only a few feet away:

Damaged neutral and splice – over Redondo near pole 62859

Spotted overhead on Redondo near Rt 376 during an evening walk. I reported it using Central Hudson’s dead streetlight page, because there seems no other way to get their attention. It may be the homeowner’s responsibility, in which case a second splice will surely appear after the next power outage.

2018-09-06

Category: Home Ec

Wyze Cam vs. Xiamoi-Dafang Hacks

Garden Hose Y-Valve Autopsy

Bathroom Drawer Knob: Whoopsie!

Miniblind Roller Repair

Amazon Product Puzzlement

Fireball Island Figures

Frayed Power Drop