Latest entries from petermolnar.net

The quest for simple, hight quality music and video playback in 2023

2023-12-03T16:23:23+00:00

The year 2023 reminded me of my mortality quite a bit, so I took a good, deep look at my home setups in case someone else ever needs to be able to understand it, use it, maintain it. I decided to start with something that we use day to day - music and video playing.

About snowflake setups

Many things in my setups work for me, it is not always user, let alone child friendly. Because I want to ensure I'm not the singular bus factor for the setup, I need to think of the following:

things need to be able to run on their own, long term
they need to be simple enough so any family members can use it, children included
someone with a baseline IT knowledge can learn how to maintain it
can't be a super-snowflake setup that's impossible to replace with something paid for, hosted, or bought

This is not easy, and with the ongoing enshittification of everything¹ it'll only get harder: new devices are cloud connected, they rely on streaming platforms which will, eventually, go bust, and in the meanwhile support for local media gets forgotten. Did you know Chromecast doesn't support DivX and old AVI formats natively², so you can't cast these without transcoding?

My journey with audio and video

Over 10 years ago we moved to England and I left my "hifi" - a Panasonic SA-AK18 which had a better service manual³ than any device I ever owned, despite falling into Black Plastic Crap category - in Hungary as it was too large to fit first in a shared accommodation, then in a one bedroom rented flat. I had a jack - RCA cable connected to it which went in from my computer, and if I wanted to play music, I used either that connection, or CDs.

Once we got here I still wanted music so I got two small Panasonic speakers for ~£20 and a cheap but hyped car amplifier, a Lepai LP-2020A, for a similar price from eBay, and continues the same connection to the laptop. When I finally brought the old speakers to the UK I realised they sounded much better in my memories, then they actually did, and I wasted quite a lot of valuable space in the car boot with them. They ended up being donated to a charity.

Later I bought a Topping MX3⁴ all-in-one (DAC, headphone- and power amplifier) as an upgrade to overcome the issues with the Lepai (eg. terrible balance). The Topping, in it's category, is a marvel, and sounded incredible with those absurdly cheap speakers. At this point I had my home server connected to it, running MPD on the local music, but I was listening more and more to Spotify over headphones at work. Eventually I had a Raspberry Pi (see the addendums) running MPD⁵, and raspotify⁶ for Spotify Connect.

Turn a few years: the pandemic and the lockdowns happened, we missed out on concerts and fun, and ended up buying a decent set of speakers, namely a pair of Dali Oberon 5⁷s. I kept the Topping, because on paper, it had just enough power for the floorstanders, and foolishly didn't listen to the people in Richer Sounds that it won't. I adore these speakers, the bring out so many extras in songs I never noticed before, and I can only recommend them.

Videos, in my childhoold were VHS tapes, later .avi files on the computer, and for many years, I simply connected the computer to the TV or the largest monitor in the house and watched them that way.

When streaming started to pick up the lack of widevine on linux only allowed 480p on many platforms. This forced me to look into other possibilities: at first our pre-WebOS LG smart TV was adequete, but it soon got abandoned by providers, so we eventually got a Chromecast with Google TV⁸. The TV can still receive DivX DLNA casts natively, and the Chromecast can do the rest, but it's fascinating to see how short lived a full era of early computer video had become due to licencing issues.

When music quality kicks you in the teeth

A little while ago we attended to a birthday celebration where the owner had a nicely sounding HiFi setup (B&W speakers, some way too expensive, class A amplifier, etc), playing some tunes in the background. One of those songs stood out with the clarity of the guitar⁹, so when I got home I decided to hear it on my setup.

It wasn't entirely disappointing - knowing it costed minimum an order of magnitude less, it was pretty good -, but it was certainly lacking: those guitar strings lacked the same tingling in certain ranges. I did try if re-arranging would help: a tiny bit, but I can't afford that kind of repositioning with a whirlwind toddler around.

And so I started searching how I could improve upon it. I marched upon audiophile forums, and my dear, there be dragons of insanity¹⁰, but not everything audiophiles say is nonsense.

Over 20 years ago, in the high school studio, there was a patch board with printed circuit boards. I have witnesses, including musicians, that plain those circuit boards with nothing but jack sockets on them can emit music if driven hard enough, for example the pre-amp output of an ancient Sound Blaster card. We didn't want to believe our eyes and ears, but there it was, so when amplifier engineers say things like "circuit board: bad" because "sound always moves", they are not incorrect.

Another thing I can stand behind is some description of speakers: analytical vs musical. When we went to test some speakers we were shown a set of them first, and once finished listening, all I could say is that I hear every instrument, every detail - just not the music. That's when we were shown the Dali Oberon 5, which sounded much closer to our preference.

Experienced audio engineers can provide valuable insights, like why listening to music on a lot of audio bricks¹¹ gets tiring after a while¹². Also thanks to comparison videos from E Project¹³ because they made the choice much easier.

A detour: among the videos I came across a few which lead me down another rabbit hole: "Combination Tones"¹⁴ - the effect of how 2 higher pitched sound can generate a 3rd phantom low pitch sound in our ears, due to biology. Apparently an avantgarde artist, Maryanne Amacher, exploited this with her music¹⁵, but I'm not ready to listen to a piece to which people referred to "it had ghosts in it" just yet.

After much time spent on reading opinions, forums, listening to tests and comparisons between brands like Cambridge Audio, NAD, Audiolab, Rega, Yamaha, Marantz, etc. we decided that the sound we preferred, based on recordings, is NAD.

The cheapest, simplest, and still AB class amplifier NAD sales is the C 316BEE v2¹⁶: analogue line-ins, no digital boards - nothing that gets obsolete in a year when the next shiny-shiny comes out, so this is what we got. Amplifier class doesn't matter; my reason for AB was that I wanted oldschool and simple.

Sidenote: apparently, in Europe it's a law that banana plug sockets need to be plugged in when the appliance is sold, so one needs to remove the plugs first. That is because the EU power adapter fits the banana sockets, and vice versa... I wasn't aware of this, so I first removed the banana plugs themselves, only to learn that I could have simply pulled those socket covers out. And no, this is not mentioned in the manual at all.

Once the NAD was plugged in it far superseded my expectations. To keep it as simple as possible, we (my wife an me) both made the following observations:

there's a lot more clarity at low volume - before, we had to turn it up to hear the music and the small things in the music well, especially the bass. Now the music is clearer, even well below conversation level loudness.
the baseline hiss of the Topping is gone
the bass is in another league; compared to the Topping it's thundering, which is a good thing, and was one of the main reasons why we were told to get a decent amplifier with the speakers in the first place
the formerly muffled tones are now just as clear as the rest

However, I want to stop here. "How to stop rewriting your site and write more"¹⁷ is a problem for us with websites, and searching for the perfect audio gear is a very similar problem. It's easy to keep going instead of enjoying the music. I'm joyous with the current setup and have no desire to seek thousands of pounds worth of gear, as after a certain point, one would need to spend orders of magnitude more money only to get a tiny bit better sound.

But the hardware is just in element in the whole chain.

There are many studies out there that most people can't tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and CD - and that is true if you're listening to a random song. It is most certainly not true when you're to listening to something you know from CD and the gear you're listening on is good enough.

"The Smell of Rain" from Mortiis¹⁸ had an official "redux" mp3 release, which I listened to for years. One day, out of curiosity, I got a copy of the CD and I was speechless: there are sounds on the CD release I never heard before, it essentially introduced a new layer to me in the music. The lossy compression was hiding it all.

We all got used to the limitations of our setups (cassettes copied from a copy of a copy of a cassette recorded from FM radio... the good old days) then later, to lossy music, and many of us have no idea what a decent, not even silly expensive setup (read: below £1000, newly bought), that's playing from CD is truly capable of.

Coming to this realisation I decided to try Tidal, which does offer CD streaming quality, unlike Spotify - and yes, it sounds much nicer. And it also sucks, because the hacks that used to enable Tidal Connect on a Raspberry are now dead¹⁹ and the available hack to use it, like the upmpdcli plugin for Tidal is significantly less user friendly, like librespot²⁰, which just exposes itself as a Spotify Connect speaker.

Following the usability credo I needed something that allows us to use either Tidal or Spotify, and it came down to some sort of Chromecast.

I soon learnt that Google used to sell a device called Chromecast audio²¹, but discontinued some years ago. It costs more used, than when it was new, yet it's still 1/3rd of the price of a WiiM Pro²² which seems to be the cheapest, audio oriented, Chromecast capable device currently on the market.

When I plugged the second hand Chromecast audio in I thought I got played: there was a rhytmic noise, like a train. Turned out the device is fine: it was the low quality power supply I plugged it into. Apparently this little thing is cheap because it lacks a lot of filters and extras the more expensive devices have, so it really needs a nice, high quality power supply, preferable it's original.

Nonetheless: it's sound quality is amazing. To me, it sounds better, than the Topping as DAC.

Update (2023-12-03): for now, I went back to Spotify. Tidal has weird issues, and it regularly had buffering problems.

Controlling and browsing

I miss the physicality of CDs, casettes, VHS tapes, but I admire how accessible endless collections of music had become. To keep my ripped CD collection usable I used to run MPD on some sort of capable device, because MPD clients had great interfaces to browse what's available.

With this Chromecast oriented setup I had to find an alternative, which could do the same, and the answer was an Android app called BubbleUPnP²³. I don't like having to pay for software, but ever since I can afford donating or tipping, I'm happy to do that. Sometimes there are exceptions, and BubbleUPnP is one of them, because it's worth it.

It's an immensely useful little app for Android that can act both as UPnP/DLNA control point and a UPnP media renderer. This means that it can play network media - or it can send it to something to play it. It can even transcode (!) if it needs to, so no need for the source to support transcoding.

To me, this is important, because the backend is a minidlna²⁴ server. It's as simple as it gets, and even some routers have it installed. No setup needed, it's all through zeroconf, and it just works.

Less of a plus is the lack of catalogue, covers for video files, or the ability to set age limits (Jellyfin has that). However: looking back at my childhood I could have watched movies recorded in VHS that were definitely not for me - I didn't want to. I wanted to see Star Wars for the 6000th time instead, so this may not pose as much of a threat as I think it could. Time will tell, I'll come back to this problem when the now <2 years old has a phone and wants to watch Alien.

This was local audio and video can be browsed from any Android device in the family, casted or viewed locally, with no issues at all.

Conclusions

I have access to millions of hours of audio and video today, but that access' usability is definitely not on par with the simplicity of inserting a disc, a casette, or a VHS tape and simply pressing "play". Then there's also the loss of nice, physical album art, but that is another topic.

If I was Windows or Mac oriented, my life would be simpler, and I could have simply dedicated a machine as media center, because on those systems, the streaming services are willing to show decent quality. If you're on Win/Mac, keep it simple, and use an older machine to do this, it'll make your life much, much simpler.

MPD is a brilliant system for local music playback, and once set up, it'll probably run forever.

Every and all hobby has rabbit holes, though some might be more expensive, than others - audio is dangerous, because there's always something nicer, more special, newer.

Some audiophiles are simply mad, others have the curse of exceptional hearing. Audio is subjective. If you like it, it's OK. More expensive won't always or won't necessary make it better for you. The class of the amplifier will also not determine how much you like the sound.

I always try to buy things that last, but with technology I tend to go cheap and tinker. Part of it is wanting to be in control, another is wanting to understand my stack. For local things where updating is not an issue and which don't need to connect to ever changing APIs this approach works, and it's even usable, but when it comes to streaming services where everyone tries to protect their turf the tinkered solutions will eventually break. If I want to avoid that I need to buy in to some of the solutions. Chromecast works as DLNA was meant to work, but it's closed, and it plays nasty with anything that's not android or Google based. It probably also syphons a stupid amount of semi-private data to Google, but regardless of this, I couldn't find anything that works overall better.

I'm starting to dislike Rasbperry Pi based solutions. It's cheap board which is used for a lot of things it was never really meant to be used for, hacks on top of hacks. Sometimes getting the right tool for the right job is worth it instead of trying to apply a swiss army knife.

The same goes for the lottery of wonders-of-the-internet products. The current Chinese audio brick rage is around Fosi and S.M.S.L. audio, like it was some years ago for Topping. Don't get me wrong: some of these products are absurdly good, but if not, you're out of your money. The price of an S.M.S.L. AL200 is more or less the price of the NAD C316BEE and the latter will be better made and will outlive the Chinese brick for sure. My Topping has already developed weird quirks, like it's flaky volume button, the rubbish from start remote control, and occasional freezing at which point it needs to powered off and on.

Addendum #1: A Raspberry Pi with extras for local source playback

There are ready made images for audio on Raspberry Pi, but Volumio²⁵ , moOde audio player²⁶, or rAudio²⁷ all failed me at some point.

Volumio is closed source, moOde and rAudio are open, but they all have one thing in common: a web based interface, which makes them incredibly slow on the Pi 3B.

They also don't play nice with custom configurations for MPD, and none of them is ready for easy satellite mode config. This means that network shares had to be added on their web config, and it made them crawl- except for moOde, which just died after I added my NFS share.

There are other, fun configuration issues. For example, on Volumio MPD set to hardware volume mixer, but Spotify Connect is still on softvol, so setting the volume on MPD sets a baseline for Spotify, but not the other way around.

However, if the goal is simply local playback:

Raspberry Pi OS Lite
MPD
and either an external DAC (in my case, the Topping MX3) or an I2S hat

gives you a rock-solid playback system, that is once setup, will probably run forever. In case you want to turn MPD into a DLNA client, there's a beautiful little software, called upmpdcli²⁸ that can do that. It worked quite nice.

This was my MPD config with the Topping:

/etc/mpd.conf

music_directory         "/path/to/music"
database                "/var/lib/mpd/database"
playlist_directory      "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
log_file                "syslog"
pid_file                "/run/mpd/pid"
state_file              "/var/lib/mpd/state"
sticker_file            "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"
user                    "mpd"
group                   "audio"
bind_to_address         "0.0.0.0"
log_level               "error"
input {
        plugin          "curl"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "hybrid_dsd"
        enabled         "no"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "wildmidi"
        enabled         "no"
}
audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "MX3"
        device          "hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
        mixer_type      "hardware"
        mixer_device    "hw:CARD=MX3"
        mixer_control   "PCM"
}
filesystem_charset      "UTF-8"

Addendum #2: Spotify Connect with raspotify

If you want to stream: raspotify²⁹ works fine for Spotify Connect, but there's no telling, how long, given it's a reverse-engineered, unofficial solution.

/etc/raspotify/conf

LIBRESPOT_AUTOPLAY=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_AUDIO_CACHE=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_DISCOVERY=
LIBRESPOT_BITRATE="320"
LIBRESPOT_FORMAT="S16"
LIBRESPOT_SAMPLE_RATE="44.1kHz"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE_TYPE="speaker"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
LIBRESPOT_BACKEND="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_MIXER="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_CONTROL="PCM"
LIBRESPOT_USERNAME="$SPOTIFY_USER"
LIBRESPOT_PASSWORD="$SPOTIFY_PASSWORD"
LIBRESPOT_INITIAL_VOLUME="50"
LIBRESPOT_VOLUME_CTRL="linear"
LIBRESPOT_ONEVENT=""
TMPDIR=/tmp

Addendum #3: Using the Topping MX3 as DAC or pre-amplifier

Do not believe Reddit experts³⁰: yes, you can use a Topping MX3 both as pre-amp and for line-in level, but keep this in mind:

for line-in you must set the volume to maximum -10dB or 56 because anything higher is above line level³¹ and will overdrive the input
as far as I understand 0 db or 76 it meant for when one connects it directly to a power amplifier

To change between level and dB display, press Mute then Mode on the remote.

Addendum #4: failed attempts

Kodi³² on Raspberry Pi 3

I have two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 -s. These things supposed to have both h264 and h265 hardware decoders, but as it turns out, this got messed up because some the decoders are closed source. This means no Kodi beyond 18 if hardware acceleration is needed for HEVC (aka x265).³³.

This wasn't my only problem: Kodi turned out to be utterly unusable with my music collection, mainly because there is no folders/file view. It was slow and miserable to use with Kore, on the web, on the TV, basically in any way.

There is a Spotify Connect addon that worked though, but nothing for Tidal.

Jellyfin server³⁴ with Jellyfin app on Chromecast

Everyone loves raving about Jellyfin, but they all forget one thing: it loves to transcode. My ~~low powered~~ energy efficient server(s) don't, and because of the aforementioned lack of DivX support in Google TV³⁵ no native playback is possible for those kind of files without transcoding, meaning this setup is a no-go.

Chromecast with Google TV with USB-C hub and the Topping MX3 as external DAC

One of the hacks I tried was to connect the Chromecast with Google TV to a USB-C hub that had PD passthrough charging and an external DAC. Unfortunately Android 12 doesn't want you to do that³⁶ ³⁷ and so it sometimes breaks rather randomly.

While there's MPD server³⁸ app for the Google TV that works flawlessly in satellite mode³⁹, because of HDMI CEC it kept turning the TV when the music started playing.

There's also no working MPD client for the TV, so while it was playing music, there was no way of stopping it from the Chromecast.

An Android tablet with USB-C hub and an external DAC

I learned it the fun way that Spotify Connect only works for the very account you log in with on the tablet - it's not like the Chromecast or librespot, where anyone on the network could do it, so this was dropped as well.

I ended up with a Zigbee smart home because the alternative was hurting my ears

2023-09-23T20:57:45+00:00

I've been eyeing with FIR (far infrared) heating for years, long before we got to buy our current house. Now we have it, and while it's certainly not a cheap way to heat, it feels lovely; getting here, however, had some unforeseen problems.

2022/2023 warning: FIR is not cheaper to run, than gas or heat pumps

It might be strange to start an article titled "I love my FIR panels" with a "why not" immediately, but this is important.

Electricity in the UK at the moment around 35p/kWh, gas is close to 10p/kWh. The FIR heating will probably need a bit less energy (as in kWh) due to the way it heats objects as well, so the room feels friendlier at a slightly lower temperature, but the required energy is not that much less. Even if it was 75% of the gas energy the cost is still 2.6x compared to gas.

If the most important factor for you is running cost, you should probably look at heat pumps. Even Herschel themselves admit this¹, however, there are factors beyond running cost which you might want to consider, such as installation, maintenance, space and plumbing requirements, lack of existing insulation, and so on.

Background

In 2018 we were about to buy a house: we won the bidding and were waiting on surveys to come back. They did came back and unfortunately we walked away from the deal - the house was surrounded by old, decaying asbestos cement roofed garages that were part of freeholds, so absolutely no way to make people replace them - but during the waiting time I started making plans on renovating it.

It had old, electric storage heaters, no gas at all, so I started looking at modern electrical heating options, and came across the idea of FIR - far infrared - heating.

There's disturbingly little about these on the net, though there are two² ³ articles which cover practically every aspect. I fell in love with the idea, but when the house deal fell through it was put on hold.

After some time I grew curious to see how and if the FIR heating actually works. To check it at a reasonable price I decided to buy a small, under desk heater⁴. Having used it in our bedroom during the night to avoid making turning the full house heating on during last winter it became clear that it's a lovely thing, but a ~200W one is definitely not suitable as the only heating system.

In 2019 we finally bought a house. It was a long journey and there was quite a bit of work that had to be done on it, starting with a full house re-wiring. This gave us an opportunity to prepare the cabling for the heating - and I should have prepared cabling for an electric water heater, which I completely forgot about.

Why not a heat pump?

The house had (still has) a gas central heating, but with quite old plumbing (and a few, occasional leaks), heavily dated panels (some not even radiators, type 10 only), and a (now, due to it's age and how the previous owners neglecting it) a somewhat loud and waning gas boiler. We didn't want to invest into renovating it, given how the world is moving to renewable energy⁵, and lowest common denominator for that is electricity.

Underfloor or wall heating is not an option in this house, so if we were to install a heat pump we would have needed MUCH bigger radiators, along with a complete redoing of the pipework. Given the available space is ~85m2, new double/triple radiators would have taken up even more of the valuable space.

I wanted to embrace the idea of as simple as possible: a heat pump, while mechanically simple, has quite a few moving parts, liquids, and needs servicing - and there's the circulating water, which, if the pipes break, causes a lot of trouble. It would still be central heating, so besides the pump we would have needed smart valves on the radiator, and the pump were to break down all heating and hot water goes with it (as with any central heating to be fair).

On top of this it would create the same "feeling" of heating: stuffy, heated, dusty air. FIR feels like the sun shining on you from the ceiling.

Panels, sizing, cost

The house is a 3 bedroom, semi-detached, cavity insulated Laing Easiform from the 1950s, made of concrete with an acceptable amount of loft insulation - "the" average UK house so to speak. It has category A double glazed windows installed in 2021, which puts it beyond the average a bit. In total it has 9 areas: a living room, dining room, kitchen, corridor, landing, bathroom, 2 bedrooms, and a small bedroom which functions as office. The living room received 2 panels instead of a single large one.

The required/recommended panel size calculation was done on Heschel's calculator, but was verified by their representative. There are lot of other sites out which will give you significantly smaller panel recommendations - please do not believe them.

We choose the more expensive Inspire range: we have been trying very hard to try longer lasting, and possibly made in UK/Europe appliances. The Inspire is made in Germany, and they have 10 years warranty - and they are plain, dead simple panels, without the controller built onto them. This latter turned out to be an important factor if you want smart options without a Chinese cloud provider, see later.

Part No.	Description	Quantity	Where
CL-750L	Herschel Inspire White 820W 1700 x 400	1	corridor
CL-750	Herschel Inspire White 750W	3	dining and living (2x) rooms
CL-900	Herschel Inspire White 900W	3	bedrooms, kitchen
CL-500	Herschel Inspire White 550W	2	study, bathroom
CL-400	Herschel Inspire White 420W	1	landing
T-T2	Herschel IQ T2 Thermostat (Inc R2 Receiver)	9	1x in each area

The total price inc VAT was close to £7500. I'm well aware £7500 is a lot, and that doesn't include the installation cost which added nearly £3000 on top of this. It took 4 days of work for 2 electricians, there were some tricky bits to connect to the wiring, some lights had to be moved, and we worked with Safeswitch, which was the only Herschel approved installer our area.

We also had a whole house voltage optimiser installed (an extra, painful, nearly £900 in material cost). The UK runs on ~242V, whereas these panels - and most electrical appliances to be clear - are optimised more for 230V. The one we bought is from Energy Ace⁶, and the installation cost included adding this as well. It pushed the voltage down to ~232V which is healthier for all the appliances.

If one decides on the more affordable panels the material cost can be nearly halved, and those panels might not need accredited installers - although it is never a bad idea to hire someone who's familiar with the project already.

Post-install problems: coil whine with the Herschel R2

Once the system was installed I happily turned it on - only to be greeted with an omnipresent coil whine from every single R2 unit, and it was wild. I made the recordings with a smartphone and you may need wired headphones to hear them; bluetooth has a compression that seems to cut it out, but in real life, especially during the night, it was intolerable.

Coil whine test #1

I got in touch with Herschel who sent a replacement unit to test if it had the issue as well, because it turned out that a lot of people can't hear the noise in these recordings. Unfortunately it also had it, but this time I made a more complex measurement. When WiFi traffic was applied the noise changed significantly.

Coil whine test #2 with WiFi traffic

I started digging to see what might be making the whine and I had a feeling it's the WiFi module, but in the process I became rather sure these are customised Tuya units⁷. I have a strong itch against WiFi based Tuya because of their Chinese cloud, which these would have had to go through to be smart, so I had one more reason to be unhappy with them. These are also special with their 2 way RF communication, so Tasmota is not an option.

The front of a disassembled Herschel T2 (thermostat) unit

The back of a disassembled Herschel T2 (thermostat) unit

Herschel R2 (switch) installed and opened

Herschel R2 (switch) disassembled

While I got refunded for these units once they were sent back, and Herschel didn't make any problems with the refund process, the rest of the message wasn't ideal:

I am saddened to hear that the replacement receiver from our latest batch is also audible to you. As I mentioned we have sold these receivers in vast numbers, (thousands), and you are only the second person to report the noise, but I fully appreciate it is a problem for you.

I find it mildly offending to sell these with the excellent quality German panels to be honest. Our current battery powered, Z-Wave based boiler controller, (re)branded as "Secure"⁸ is far superior to these units - though they come with their own issues without additional z-ware routers in a house -, but the switch is rated only to 3A. I'm sure that with minor modifications it could take up to 10A and would be a significantly better fit with the Inspire line, particularly from a privacy/security perspective.

My current Z-Wave based, battery powered, 7 day programmable thermostat to control the gas boiler

Looking for alternatives, settling with Zigbee (3.0)

I went through my options: I had some issues with Z-Wave before, learned that KNX would cost more, than the system installed, skipped a lot other things, until I bumped into Zigbee 3.0.

I bought Sonoff ZBMINIs⁹ to be the controllers, which are great, and carelessly went for Aqara temperature and humidity sensors. Don't buy Aqara unless you go all-in with the brand. I had to sell those and buy Sonoff SNZB-02 Temperature and Humidity Sensors¹⁰ because some of the Aqara devices kept stopping sending data no matter what I did. The host controller is a Sonoff ZigBee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus P¹¹, which feeds into Zigbee2MQTT¹² which sends to Mosquitto¹³ which talks to Domoticz¹⁴.

Final setup of a panel in the study, on the ceiling. The fused switch is required by UK standards, the other box contained the R2 switch originally, now it has the Sonoff ZBMINI

There's an alternative firmware for the SNZB-02-s¹⁵ which would turn them into a real thermostat with binding - I've been testing one for a while, and so far, it's surprisingly nice. I haven't had the time to replace the firmware on all of them (it includes some temporary soldering), but there are plans to do so.

I tested the EFEKTA firmware. It worked for a few weeks, and yes, it can be used as a standalone thermo/humidistat, but after some time it started to transmit multiple temperature values simultaneously, making the FIR to stay on all the time, so I decided to drop the experiment and stay with the stock firmware on the SNZB-02s.

One day I might have time to write about this setup in more details, but here's an important bit: for reasons I'm yet to identify why, but the initial setup with a Raspberry Pi 3B was unstable, and the Pi kept rebooting. I bought another fanless Lenovo M600¹⁶ and it's been rock solid since.

I finally found a solution to my interface problem: I bought a used "2-in-1" PC, namely a Dell Venue Pro 7140¹⁷. It's maintainable, has a dock, a nice touchscreen, and can act as the server on it's own, and it has a full sized USB port, so it was possible to add the Zigbee stick. To my surprise, it has a fan, but once it was set into powersave mode, it barely ever came up. The OS is Ubuntu 22.04, because I wanted a full touch-screen support, and this was the simplest way to do so.

The Dell, out of the blue, died so hard that I couldn't boot it. Turned out that if the battery has any issue in it the charger alone can't power the device. Back to the fanless Lenovo M600¹⁸ and, for the time being, a tablet to control it, because proper touchscreens cost an arm and a leg.¹⁹

Domoticz vs thermostats

I tried Home Assistant many times but I find their YAML configurations repulsive: it's practically random and complicated. Yes, there is documentation, and it's OK, but I'll take a programming language any timer over that YAML horror. Once it told me that python 3.9, which is the Python in the current stable Debian, will be deprecated for HA in 2023 I walked away for good.

Domoticz on the other hand is small, simple (maybe sometimes even too simple), and can be scripted with a lot of languages, including it's own dialect of Lua, called dzVents²⁰. So I did the following: I created virtual thermostats for each room, a virtual boost switch for each room, than added a script that connected these to the state changes of the relevant temperature sensors and switches in each room. The "sufni" (shed in Hungarian) is special because that's an oil radiator and it only ever comes up when the shed goes below 4°C - I have some paint there which shouldn't be allowed to freeze.

return {
    on = {
        devices = {
            'Háló', 'Gyerekszoba', 'Kisszoba', 'Fürdő', 'Lépcsőfeljáró',
            'Folyosó', 'Nappali', 'Stúdió', 'Konyha',
            'Sufni',
            'Háló termosztát', 'Gyerekszoba termosztát', 'Kisszoba termosztát', 'Fürdő termosztát', 'Lépcsőfeljáró termosztát',
            'Folyosó termosztát', 'Nappali termosztát', 'Stúdió termosztát', 'Konyha termosztát',
            'Sufni termosztát',
            'Háló boost', 'Gyerekszoba boost', 'Kisszoba boost', 'Fürdő boost', 'Lépcsőfeljáró boost',
            'Folyosó boost', 'Nappali boost', 'Stúdió boost', 'Konyha boost',
        },
    },
    logging = {
        marker = '[thermostat]',
    },
    execute = function(domoticz, device)
        local basename = string.gsub(string.gsub(device.name, ' termosztát', ""), ' boost', "")
        local thermostat = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' termosztát')
        local temperature_sensor = domoticz.devices(basename)
        local boost = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' boost')
        local heater = nil
        local hysteresis = nil

        if (basename == 'Sufni') then
            hysteresis = 1
            heater = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' olajradiátor')
        else
            hysteresis = 0.3
            heater = domoticz.devices(basename .. ' FIR')
        end

        if ((device.id == boost.id) and (boost.active == true)) then
            boost.switchOff().afterSec(900)
            if (heater.active == false) then
                domoticz.log(basename ..  ' ON (boost)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
                heater.switchOn()
            end
        end

        if ((boost.active == false) and (heater.active == true) and (temperature_sensor.temperature >= (thermostat.setPoint + hysteresis))) then
            domoticz.log(basename ..  ' OFF (thermostat)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
            heater.switchOff()
        end

        if ((heater.active == false) and (temperature_sensor.temperature <= (thermostat.setPoint - hysteresis))) then
            domoticz.log(basename ..  ' ON (thermostat)', domoticz.LOG_INFO)
            heater.switchOn()
        end

    end
}

The schedule is done with timers on each thermostat:

Current schedule of the living room; between 9:00 and 19:00 the gas central heating takes over until I figure out how not to pay and arm and a leg for electricity :(

It works as expected, without issues.

Energy needs and running cost

The end of 2022 was quite nice in terms of weather at the beginning, but December brought serious colds - in the past 10 years we lived in the UK and I haven't experienced periods in Cambridge where the temperature barely moved above zero for days:

Early December 2022 was COLD in the UK

We decided to run a test and see the cost if we rely solely on the panels to heat. While they were able to handle it and heat up the house, which is good, the cost was brutal. Keep it in mind that we regularly wash, use the dryer, cook, and work from home, so the only thing we used gas for was hot water on 11 Dec. The drop you see later is when we decided to turn the gas heating back on between 09:00 and 17:00 so the clicking and the noise doesn't bother us during the night.

68kWh of electricity costs £24... and that was a single day.

In the meanwhile our garden looked like this - in front of the bench there's a pond which had at least 10cm of solid ice on it. In previous years it barely froze over.

Does far infrared heating work?

In my experience, yes. It's lovely using them, the heat is instant and stays with the house. The heat does eventually get everywhere, it will not be "shaded" by desks and furniture more, than a heating panel or a type 10/20 wet unit would be by furniture.

It is, however, different, and with regular thermostats that have 1-2°C hysteresis, it could be tricky to make them perfect.

I'd seen a video on youtube about someone telling that a 1kW FIR panel barely heats him up sitting next to it. If I sit in front of our 200W portable it already heats me up and the 900W panels in the bedrooms can easily deal with the rooms. It might just be the difference between cheap panels and expensive ones, so be very careful on choosing a brand.

The only thing we had a problem with is the humidity and green mould (like the one on stale bread) in the bathroom on some baskets of ours in the aforementioned December period, but we weren't the only ones, so I can't yet tell if it was due to the new heating, or the mixture of other circumstances.

Conclusions, observations, summary

The way FIR heats feels nicer, than many other heating methods: it's able to heat you up at some deep level very fast, but as the electrician installing them said: it's more "digital" whereas floor heating, for example, is more "analogue".

The panels radiate from their back as well, meaning putting the upstairs ones on the walls instead of the ceiling could result in better use of that heat - that is if the wall is made of material that can "store" heat - solid walls would be ideal - and not from clinker blocks, like ours.

Some of the ceilings developed hairline cracks behind the heaters, but only upstairs, with the loft and the insulation above them. I'm guessing it's where the plasterboards meet, and I'm yet to address them.

SONOFF is reliable, cheap, and generally speaking just works.

Mixing Zigbee 3.0 and 1.2 can result in the 1.2 devices losing their way and stopping sending data.

This type of heating makes more sense when it's combined with solar panels, battery storage, and utilising varying electricity costs throughout the day. On single tariff it will be expensive, just like plain electric heating.

Was it worth it? Even with devastating energy prices I believe that in the long run, it was. When we get to the point to replace the boiler with an electric one as well²¹ we can get rid of the gas, the radiators, which will free up a lot of space. Plus I like how they look on the ceiling, making it less boring and less usual - although this is a subjective thought.

28 July, 2022

2022-07-28T08:49:54+00:00

This post is a reply to: https://rubenerd.com/russia-withdraws-from-the-iss/

Yes. I felt and feel the same, and the current news are the saddest step backwards in my lifetime so far.

I somewhat also feel the same about the Concorde. That thing was a symbol of engineering, and while it was full of issues, abandoning the whole class still feels like we simply gave up on forward looking engineering and decided to polish what we have.

Two thoughts and recommendation: The End of Eternity¹ from Isaac Asimov, and what happens when humanity always takes the safe and comfy route; and a movie, The Arrow² "The right stuff, the wrong time".

08 January, 2022

2022-01-08T14:38:23+00:00

This post is a reply to: https://jamesg.blog/2022/01/06/brainstorming-email-to-rss/

James, you are most probably looking for something like https://github.com/remko/atomail/

Old Web, New Web, Indie Web

2023-07-13T11:52:09+00:00

If you have to decide on the order of creative freedom vs data ownership, what order do you choose?

When you set your mind to search for something explicit, the internet becomes an incredible place: from the tiny, "recommended for you" world of algorithms claiming to know you better, than yourself, you're suddenly in uncharted territories of thoughts of others.

There were times, long ago, when this was normal. For example, there were specific websites built only to contain links to other sites - 'portals' - or communities that connected sites to the eachother - webrings -, so it was easy to suddenly drop of your known internet.

This is much harder today, particularly because some of those recommendation engines (think of youtube, netflix, and so on - even ebay (!!!) recently) are not bad at all. There's only one, tiny issue: they tend to limit whatever they recommend more and more, only showing you a glimpse of what is available on their service, let alone on the internet.

Usually this phenomenon is called a "recommendation bubble", and to get out of it, one needs to deliberately seek beyond it. This isn't trivial though: there are known unknowns (when there's a question on an exam you know you should have learnt, but you didn't) and unknown unknowns (things you'd never before heard of). If we don't know what to look for, which is the vast majority of the internet itself for anyone, the search engines become useless. That is why links to other sites were and are so utterly important: to be able to explore. There is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google, which once took a friend of mine to a Flash version of the 'Tunak Tunak' song when he searched for "Cthulhu" eons ago, so using that button can sometimes be fun, I'll give Google that.

In the past weeks I've found myself staring at websites designed in early 90s Geocities style, particularly at web manifestos: why their site exists, and why it was better in the good ol' days, and how can it be similar today¹ ² ³. Surprisingly enough, there were similar manifestos from before the web2.0 craze of the early 2000s⁴, but most of them now seems to be lost to decay⁵.

Most of these manifestos are new, written in the 2020s by people who had experienced the 90s web. They all have some overlapping thoughts, such as: the web should stay weird, whacky, whimsical, (why do all these words start with a w?), personal websites are important, the creative freedom one's own site gives is wonderful, and that social media is becoming monotonous and lifeless.

There are also a lot of people longing for something they believe is lost:

I miss the useless web. I miss your grandpa’s blog. I miss weird web art projects that trolled me. I miss fan pages for things like hippos. I wish I didn’t feel like the web was collapsing into just a few sites plus a thousand resumes. Sarah Drasner Jul 1, 2018

They are only partially correct. Much of the old content is still there, but because they are not HTTPS, or haven't been updated in years, decades sometimes, Google de-prioritizes, or even purges them from the search options. Google, sadly, has no obligations to remembering⁶.

These days there are wonderously easy to use tools to make websites - although some of them are better⁷, than others - so why isn't everyone making their own page?

Some early social networks, such as MySpace, allowed profile customization at a very deep level, which is actually enough for many people to make a small self-representation on the net. I was recently pointed at modern, but similar examples⁸, showing how many are happy with simply a profile they can completely design. They are not after a whole website, they are after a way to be creative.

In 2019, Flash was killed off, and Vice published an article: "Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era"⁹. There is no overstatement in that title; the Flash era was absolutely incredible. It didn't just give us geniously designed websites (I vividly remember the site of Cuvée des Trolls, a beer, with a built in minigame), meme citadels¹⁰, unforgettable minigames, no; it also gave us things like Happy Tree Friends¹¹. Flash had it's problems (many of them to be honest), but it indeed gave an unprecedented flexibility to be original, and many used it to expand the possibilites of the web, to go beyond text and websites.

Coming to this realisation I got into some ~~arguments~~ discussions on the IndieWeb chats¹² about ordering the IndieWeb principles¹³. There are multiple elements on the list of IndieWeb priorities, but no matter how many times I read it, the one I believe to be the most important - "have fun" - is down at the bottom, like a bit of an afterthought.

The IndieWeb wiki¹⁴ is a disturbingly messy, but staggeringly deep site, with a crazy amount of collected reference, knowledge, and tooling around the IndieWeb Movement. It is important to realise that the IndieWeb - as in indieweb.org - is not the same as that manifesto from 1997¹⁵ called "the indie web". The former is a community, a movement, made up of people believing and following those principles, whereas the latter is the old Internet, The World Wide Web: a haphazardly entangled mess of individual websites.

As time passes, not truly owning a digital creative work, including a website, can quickly become a problem. There are many documented cases where usernames, handles, subdomains were taken over by the host¹⁶, and even more cases of hosting providers, silos, etc going under¹⁷. One must have the option to move and save their content to avoid losing it, hence the need for your own domain name, which can be repointed to another place, if needed.

The rest of the IndieWeb ideas, in my opinion, are completely optional. For example, marking up HTML with microformats¹⁸ is only useful if someone wants their content machine-parseable for other IndieWeb sites (or search engines that still respect microformats v1). This is the reason why there aren't clear guides: this is not a step-by-step thing. The owner of a website needs to decide what functionality they want to participate in, and for those functionalities, the guides are much clearer.

However... many people leaving social media might want to leave it and it's features - likes, comments, etc - for good, and are looking for their own place, their own home on the internet. In many cases this is a creative, visual call. There is no need to first register a domain name to start filling this desire: jump on a place like Neocities¹⁹ and start creating - and I firmly believe this is the most important step: the will, and action, to create.

It might be time for IndieWeb to rethink principles and priorities. The current list might appeal to developers, or people deeply emerged in utilizing social media silos, looking to ease their workflow, or their fears of losing their content, but it doesn't necessarily talk to the ones looking to satisfy the call of creativity, or those disillusioned of social media itself.

PS: I asked my wife, Nora, to proof-read this entry. At the beginning, her immediate answer to the question in the summary was: "of course data ownership has priority!". After reading it through I I asked her to revisit the question, and she told me that if she sells a painting - she has been practising Chinese brush painting for many years now²⁰ -, she loses that painting, yet that loss will make her happy, and so maybe, the possibility of creativity is indeed higher on the list of priorities.

A view of Lanzarote

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

During our stay, it rained on Lanzarote. That is a rather rare event on the island, and it also resulted in quite a few clouds. The good thing about clouds is that if they are nice, one can use them in a photo as a feature.

I've changed the contrast on this photo a bit.

Sunset at La Santa

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

We were looking for the perfect spot to take photos of another view, only to realize that there are a few points on the island where resorts were built on such an ugly manner that it blocks out the view of the otherwise incredibly area around La Santa.

Nonetheless, just before we were deciding to leave the sun started to set and gave us some magnificent lights on the shore.

Petra of the Canaries

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

There are some sandstone formations on Lanzarote, and they are becoming an Instragram location, so taking shoots without people in it takes some patience, but it's worth it.

View of Timanfaya from La Geria

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

If you get to La Geria, a vineyard on Lanzarote, before they open, you can sneak to the back of the building, only to be greated with a wonderful view of the inner parts of the island.

I used a 1.4x lens extension, so the real focal length is around 189mm.

Vineyard of La Geria

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

Another view on the vineyars of La Geria: beyond the iconic round arrangement of the malvasía grape there are also other arrangements, like these.

Volcanic shapes

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

There is no backstory with this one, I simply liked the shapes complement eachother.

A view of volcanoes from a seat on a camel

2021-12-30T21:13:04+00:00

This was our second visit to Lanzarote; the first one was only 3 days, and we had to skip quite a few things that looked interesting. This time we included them, like getting on a camel.

Camels used to be the main working animals on the island, but nowadays they mostly becase a tourist attraction. The are the ones with a single hump, the humps are mounted with seats for two people, one on both sides.

My take from sitting there is that the camel is certainly not the most comfortable animal to travel on, but they are definitely characters: the one behind us enjoyed hiding in our shade and started to cuddle it's head on my wife's shoulders.

The tour is not long, but it gives an opportunity to witness a few views of the landscape that is otherwise not possible; like the one above.

Latest entries from petermolnar.net

The quest for simple, hight quality music and video playback in 2023

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My journey with audio and video

When music quality kicks you in the teeth

Controlling and browsing

Conclusions

Addendum #1: A Raspberry Pi with extras for local source playback

Addendum #2: Spotify Connect with raspotify

Addendum #3: Using the Topping MX3 as DAC or pre-amplifier

Addendum #4: failed attempts

Kodi32 on Raspberry Pi 3

Jellyfin server34 with Jellyfin app on Chromecast

Chromecast with Google TV with USB-C hub and the Topping MX3 as external DAC

An Android tablet with USB-C hub and an external DAC

I ended up with a Zigbee smart home because the alternative was hurting my ears

2022/2023 warning: FIR is not cheaper to run, than gas or heat pumps

Background

Why not a heat pump?

Panels, sizing, cost

Post-install problems: coil whine with the Herschel R2

Looking for alternatives, settling with Zigbee (3.0)

Domoticz vs thermostats

Energy needs and running cost

Does far infrared heating work?

Conclusions, observations, summary

28 July, 2022

08 January, 2022

Old Web, New Web, Indie Web

A view of Lanzarote

Sunset at La Santa

Petra of the Canaries

View of Timanfaya from La Geria

Vineyard of La Geria

Volcanic shapes

A view of volcanoes from a seat on a camel

Kodi³² on Raspberry Pi 3

Jellyfin server³⁴ with Jellyfin app on Chromecast