Summer is over and it's time to get back in business

Now that summer is over and summer vacation is just a faint memory in the past it's time to get back in business. This time I'm writing about boring work days and how I'm going to try to overcome that troubling feeling I'm getting.

Background

For the past four weeks in work the days have been repeating themselves. Every day has been like a repeat from the day before but a bit slower. When this happens it means that work tasks are also repeating the same pattern again and again.

For me this is a bad situation!

I know from the past that this is a situation where I'm getting bored and losing my motivation more and more every day. When I'm losing my motivation at work I know I'm also losing my motivation to do anything useful at my free time.

I knew I had to do something so I wouldn't lose interest to everything and one day I would wake up realizing that I've spent six months browsing netflix.

First step

Probably not the first thing I did but one of the firsts anyway. I told my colleagues that I'm having trouble keeping my motivation up so they know that I'm not at my best performance because I've lost my interest and my thoughts are wandering.

Second step

I decided that I'm going to reverse the situation. By reversing I mean that I'm going get my daily or weekly motivation during my free time and hopefully that will also spike up my work motivation.

The reverse part one

Just this week I signed up for a online course about scala programming. Few of my colleagues attended this same course a year ago and they all said it was a good course so I decided to give it a try. Learning scala, more than I know now, has been on my todo-list for a long time so this seems like a win-win situation.

The reverse part two

The second part of the reverse was to get back to my blog that got on a good start during the first half of the year. Now that I have started writing again let's just hope I can keep this as a habit.

Comments

DIY home automation v1

For years I've been interested in home automation. I've had remote controllable outlets from a few different manufacturers but I've never been quite satisfied with just the remote. What if I could control my outlets within my local network from any device, now that's something I wanted to have.

Controlling outlets from computer A few years back I bought a three pack of remote controllable nexa outlets. A while ago I discovered that another company manufactured a control unit that's plugged in to a USB port and best of all they provided linux software for it.

To make full use of these I'd need a computer that's always on and that's where I could make use of Raspberry Pi.

Setting up outlets
I had already set up my outlets with the remote that came in the retail pack just follow the manufacturer instructions.
It might be possible to configure the outlets completely via the software at least for some brands but I haven't tried it so I can't be sure.…

DIY home automation v2

Previously I set up a simple home automation system for controlling outlets at home. So far I've used the system for controlling various lights at our home. I've been satisfied with oulet controlling via browser but I wanted something more.

Objective
I had a idea of temperature and humidity monitoring via Raspberry Pi. I was already browsing for electronics components needed for building a system with sensors but buying single components seemed a bit expensive and I would also have to actually connect all the components to RPi and write the code to read the sensor data.

Mainly because of the price the components I started looking for a pre-built system with the preferred sensors. Almost immediately I came across Proove's sensor that has indoor and outdoor temperature sensors and a indoor humidity sensor. Best part of the pre-built system is that it's already compatible with TellStick system that I used for controlling outlets.

I decided to buy the pre-built sensor syst…

DIY home automation, new generation

I've had my DIY home automation system for controlling outlets and reading sensor data running for about two years now. The system has been working fine and I haven't had any need to touch the code since I added the sensor reading to it, until a few months back.

Need for new functionality
Few months ago I got a new IoT toy for a lend from a friend until I'd get my own toys, a ruuvitag sensor beacon. Ever since I found the ruuvitag for the first time from kickstarter I had the idea of getting a bunch of ruuvitags and adding their weather station sensor readings as part of my home automation system.

The original home automation backend included only tellstick compatible devices and was written in Python, and in my mind it was kind of a hack. The ruuvitag beacons communicate via BLE i.e. Bluetooth Low Energy and that meant that I needed to add functionality to read the beacon data via bluetooth.

I found a ruuvitag Python library and initially thought that I'd just use that a…

Thoughts about software development

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