Category Archives: Hack my House

Hack My House: ZoneMinder’s Keeping an Eye on the Place

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Hacks are often born out of unfortunate circumstances. My unfortunate circumstance was a robbery– the back door of the remodel was kicked in, and a generator was carted off. Once the police report was filed and the door screwed shut, it was time to order cameras. Oh, and record the models and serial numbers of all my tools.

We’re going to use Power over Ethernet (POE) network cameras and a ZoneMinder install. ZoneMinder has a network trigger capability, and we’ll wire some magnetic switches to our network of PXE booting Pis, using those to inform the Zoneminder server of door …read more

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Hack My House: Running Raspberry Pi Without an SD Card

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Many of us have experienced the pain that is a Raspberry Pi with a corrupted SD card. I suspect the erase-on-write nature of flash memory is responsible for much of the problem. Regardless of the cause, one solution is to use PXE booting with the Raspberry Pi 3. That’s a fancy way to say we’ll be booting the Raspberry Pi over the network, instead of from an SD card.

What does this have to do with Hacking My House? As I discussed last time, I’m using Raspberry Pi as Infrastructure by building them into the walls of every room in …read more

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Hack My House: Raspberry Pi as Infrastructure

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I finally had my own house. It was a repossession, and I bought it for a song. What was supposed to be a quick remodel quickly turned into the removal of most of the drywall in the house. There was a silver lining on this cloud of drywall dust and loose insulation. Rather than constantly retro-fitting cabling and gadgets in as needed, I could install everything ahead of time. A blank canvas, when the size of a house, can overwhelm a hacker. I’ve spent hours thinking through the infrastructure of my house, and many times I’ve wished for a guide …read more

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