Open Source Posts

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0.1. This release has no major changes in it and is solely about addressing security issues in many of the underlying libraries used by petfeedd. To install it or upgrade from previous versions, you can simply run: docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest

After five beta releases and months of testing, I am happy to announce petfeedd Version 1.0 is now available. All changes from the beta branch have been merged in and the release is now available on Docker Hub. To install it or upgrade from Version 0.2, you can simply run: docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest And restart. It should perform all the upgrades needed for version 1.0.

Twelve years ago I wrote a little program called Dystill. It is a filtering mail delivery agent that could sort and filter email based on rules stored in a MySQL database. At the time I wrote it, I was transitioning away from using Gmail to running my own mail server, and I needed a way to filter my incoming mail into folders (akin to Gmails labels and automatic filtering) with the ability to quickly add rules without having to manually edit files. And for twelve years, that little program has just run reliably in the background with very few updates. The last time I changed it was 2012. In the meantime, the world has moved on and Python 2 (which it was written in) is no longer supported. And truthfully it was the last piece of Python 2 code in my whole setup. But I had been punting on updating it because it worked.

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0. It’s been almost three years since the last release of petfeedd (version 0.2.2), and Version 1.0 marks a new start for this project. I have been running the beta release on my feeders for the last week and I believe I have smashed all the major bugs.

I’ve had several people write me recently and ask about how to use petfeedd with multiple servos. It’s actually now my most common feature request, so I will definitely be sure that that is added in the rewrite that I am currently working on. In the meantime, you can run multiple instances of petfeedd using Docker, each pointed to a different servo. I would be sure to offset each servo by a few seconds to be sure you don’t have any voltage drop issues with the Raspberry Pi.

petfeedd, the software for pet feeders, has a new release. 0.2.2 is a maintenance release that add support for new Raspberry Pi Hardware. There are no breaking changes in this release.

petfeedd, the daemon I wrote for my Raspberry Pi-powered cat feeders has been updated to fix a number of bugs people were seeing attempting to install it since I originally wrote it in 2017. Perhaps the biggest change is Docker support! That’s right, if you just want to run petfeedd, now you can do it in just three commands! No more installing various libraries and things (but that approach still works as well.)

Launched two new pieces of open source code in the last couple of months. PlayerControls PlayerControls is a macOS Cocoa framework that creates a View containing playback controls for media like videos or sounds. It is written in pure Swift 4 and has no dependencies. SearchParser SearchParser is a parser that converts a freeform query into an intermediate object, that can then be converted to query many backends (SQL, ElasticSearch, etc). It includes translators for SQL (using PDO) and Laravel Eloquent ORM. It supports a faceted language search as commonly found on many sites across the web. It is written in modern PHP. Both are licensed under the MIT license. Go check them out on Github.

As you can tell from the last few posts, I’ve been having a lot of fun with collectd and instrumenting my systems. But I had one glaring hole until recently: my Ubiquti Unifi AP access points. Well no longer!

Okay, no profit in this, but it certainly is fun! I have two Nest thermostats in my house and, after some teething pains (yay the life of an early adopter) they have been pretty solid. But they’re also black boxes that I know little about. I know they’re collecting mountains of data and sending it back to the Google mothership. Wouldn’t it be nice to get at some of that data and build my own reports?