nico.ninja
A deep dive journey about electronics, computers, radio and so on.
Electronics, computers, radio, IoT, motorsports, software development and microcontroller-based projects.
Articles
2026
- Hack your already hacked devices (Oct 18)
Instead of adding another ESP to the house, I added an air quality sensor to my already hacked ePaper panel. - Building a SatNOGS ground station (Aug 8)
Building a UHF SatNOGS ground station, messing with turnstile antennas, LNAs and homemade cavity filters. - Flipper Zero APRS Transceiver (May 3)
It started as a port of a Flipper Zero APRS transmitter to a DRA818V module and ended up as a full VHF APRS transceiver. - Improving filtering in my SDR receiver (Apr 17)
I swapped my RTL-SDRs for a HackRF One and got a waterfall full of noise. Better filtering brought it back. - RadioBerry on a Yaesu FT-80C (Feb 4)
My dad showed up with an old Yaesu FT-80C. We put a RadioBerry inside and kept the original front panel and LCD working. - RadioBerry on a Vertex VX1700 (Jan 22)
Our first steps into the RadioBerry, turning a Vertex VX1700 into an FPGA-based HF SDR transceiver.
2025
- Leverage (Aug 1)
What carrying debris on a construction site taught me about multiplying impact through people. - What are you obsessed with? (Jul 28)
The fine line between passion and madness, and why I choose to walk it. - Testing a band-stop filter (Jul 9)
No VNA at home, so I measured my FM band-stop filter with a HackRF and an RTL-SDR. - Building a Smarter Weekly Meal Planner with AI (Apr 28)
Honey, what do you want to eat this week? I built an AI agent to answer that, one iteration at a time. - Home Assistant-enabled Air Freshener (Feb 20)
I had no real reason to connect my air freshener to Home Assistant. I did it anyway.
2024
- Netgear ReadyNAS remote decryption (Dec 22)
My ReadyNAS needs a USB key to unlock its encrypted volumes, and I'm never home when it reboots. So I made it decrypt remotely. - VHF/UHF OpenWebRX+ receiver (Dec 15)
Now that I had a VHF/UHF antenna, I put a dual band OpenWebRX+ receiver on the Internet for anyone to listen. - VHF/UHF Flowerpot antenna build (Sep 15)
A simple dual band VHF/UHF flowerpot antenna we built at the Radio Club Buenos Aires. - Smart blinds with Home Assistant (Aug 15)
Motorized roller blinds that never talk to the cloud. Tuya motors, localtuya and Home Assistant. - The OpenIPC Project (Jul 30)
A knockoff security camera with terrible software and no RTSP. OpenIPC firmware turned it into something useful. - CW Morse code trainer (Jul 3)
Learning Morse code for my ham radio license with a little Arduino trainer. - HC-SR501 PIR Sensor and Home Assistant (May 21)
Walking down dark stairs half asleep is the worst. An HC-SR501 PIR sensor, an ESP-01 and Home Assistant fixed it. - Using your Yubikey for SSH (May 12)
My SSH private keys live inside a YubiKey now. How resident keys work, and what happens if you lose one. - Migrating to Home Assistant (Mar 30)
HomeKit was getting too basic for me. Moving my home automation to Home Assistant on Proxmox. - AC power meter (Mar 27)
I didn't want a random WiFi power meter on my network, so I built a 4-channel one with Prometheus metrics. - Apple Home compatible led strip (Feb 26)
Instead of buying a Philips Hue strip, I built my own RGB LED strip for the office that works with Apple Home. - 3D printer remote shutdown (Feb 1)
Powering down my 3D printer from anywhere before bad things go on, built with spare parts. - Raspberry Pi UniFi Controller Mastery (Jan 30)
Things I wish I had known before running the UniFi Controller on a Raspberry Pi. Spoiler, it's mostly MongoDB. - GOES satellite reception part 1 (Jan 17)
First steps to receive full-earth images from the GOES 16 satellite at 1694.1 MHz. The dish, the feed and the software. - Slides of my satellites talk at Nerdear.la 2023 (Jan 17)
Slides from Signals from outer space, my Nerdear.la 2023 talk about hunting satellite signals with cheap SDRs. - The perfect fit for my 2011 Macbook Air (Jan 9)
My 2011 MacBook Air was lying in a drawer. Xubuntu 23.10 brought it back to life. - Simple WAN failover with MikroTik (Jan 4)
My favorite way to do WAN failover on MikroTik is recursive routes. How they work, plus a full dual-WAN setup with VLANs.
2023
- ATU-100 antenna tuner configuration (Nov 29)
My father wanted his ATU-100 to start tuning at 1.1:1 SWR instead of 1.3:1. One EEPROM bit did it. - Upgrading Proxmox VE 7.x (Nov 24)
My notes from upgrading my Proxmox VE server from 7.1 all the way to 8.x. - Lights on the Honda Cub EZ90 (Aug 30)
The EZ90 comes without lights, horn or mirrors. I wanted it on city streets, so I added all of them. - My system (Aug 9)
Habits, inbox zero, notifications, journaling. The system I use to get things done, and maybe it works for you too. - Controlling AC Units with Apple Home and Siri (Jul 9)
My air conditioners don't speak HomeKit, so I taught them. Decoding the IR remote and making Siri control the temperature. - Synchronizing the Bitcoin blockchain with a satellite (Jun 15)
An old satellite dish, an SDR and a Raspberry Pi pulling the Bitcoin blockchain from Blockstream's satellite over Argentina. - Monitoring the Netgear ReadyNAS with SNMP (Jun 13)
Keeping my ReadyNAS 312 in check with SNMP and snmp_exporter, before a disk dies on me. - A Bitcoin Mempool gauge indicator (Jun 6)
A servo needle that shows Bitcoin's next-block fee in sats/vByte, driven by an ESP8266. - Pwnagotchi fixes and improvements (May 25)
My Pwnagotchi came out of the drawer with a swollen battery. New battery, new GPS board. - Dyno Tuning the Golf GTI MK7.5 (May 19)
Stock pulls, a surprise on the rollers, and a Stage 1 tune on my Golf GTI MK7.5. Did it really make 310 HP? - Fuego Austral 2023: Find your friends (May 8)
LED pendants that light up when your friends are close. Built a week before Fuego Austral 2023.
2022
- Writing a custom wheel decoder for the Megasquirt (Dec 31)
The Megasquirt 2 had no wheel decoder for Honda K20 and K24 engines, so I wrote one into the firmware. - My home server (Dec 28)
From a 400MHz Celeron rescued from the trash to a Proxmox box. Why I have a home server and why you should as well. - Hiding your footprints (May 15)
A neverending journey on hiding our digital footprint. Finding the old emails, usernames and accounts you left online, and cleaning up the mess.
2021
- Gamifying the Pwnagotchi (Oct 31)
I added an e-ink display, GPS geolocation and GPS time to my Pwnagotchi, and finally got it to go into AI mode.