Archive
Automation
Industrial automation, SCADA, PLCs
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Watching the Watchdog: Nine Months of UPS Data, a Third of It Missing
The UPS was fine. The grid was fine. The monitoring was the thing that kept dying — a third of nine months of telemetry simply missing, a firewall that only let one host’s replies through, and a shutdown…
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The Letterbox Is an Attack Surface: Going Paperless with an AI Mail Clerk
Scanning is a tenth of going paperless. The rest: OCR baked into the PDFs rather than an index, a search service that was quietly eating a third of the NAS, and an AI that reads the mail —…
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The Meter Was Already Broadcasting: Reading Gas Usage Off the Air
A $30 software-defined radio, an antenna, and an SCM+ decoder — reading the number a utility meter already shouts over 900 MHz several times an hour, instead of photographing its dials. Protocol notes and the current state of…
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Three Numbers and a Float Switch: Instrumenting a Fish Tank
An ESP32 reading pH, dissolved solids and temperature off a tank — with three-point probe calibration exposed as Home Assistant buttons, and TDS temperature-compensated so the reading means something.
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Teaching a Camera to Read a 60-Year-Old Gas Meter
I built a computer vision pipeline that reads my outdoor gas meter from a photograph — four alternating-direction dials, ORB alignment for a future drone, and a philosophy of failing honestly instead of guessing.