I finally managed to get my Home Assistant and ESPHome up and running. That’s awesome. Now we need to involve Azure somehow. But first we actually need another piece of hardware. We need to hook up a temperature sensor! Yeah, let’s start there. Solder on! I bought a sensor called Dallas DS18B20 off of eBay. This sensor needs 3.3 volt, ground and a connection to a data line. The ESP32 has pins for all of this. I used dataline 2 (GPIO02). Hooked it up with a resistor with 8,2Kohm between the data line and 3.3volts. This is to get a more correct reading (some sort of a baseline voltage), if I und ..read more

We already have the power! We now need to get my ESP32 micro contoller online and able to connect to the Wi-Fi. There are some components and gotchas along the way of connecting things up. Let me show you… Prepare the infrastructure My plan is to use my installation of Home Assistant in this project. This runs in a docker container, on a Linux VM, running on my local Proxmox host. Since I’ve got a dedicated VLAN for my IoT-devices I want Home Assistant (hereby called HA for short) to talk to the devices directly. HA therefore needs a network interface in addition to the primary one. The journe ..read more

I’m not sure if it’s my elite hacker skillz, or just my wish for better user experiences that drives me to find ways to wash out the lines between your own computer and desktops running in the cloud. Either way, I found this method online that I want to share with you. I will share what my challenge was, how I solved it and what it feels like for the users. The challenge: The thing that always has bugged me with Remote Desktop-solutions are the fact that the user has TWO DESKTOPS! One local and one remote. The user experience is almost always better locally, but still they are forced to log on ..read more

Let me tell you a little story about a useful tool called Microsoft Secure Score and how one of it’s recommendations led to a crisis by killing off authentication for a Azure File Share… The Story A customer had been using Azure File Share for quite some time as a replacement for a little local NAS. All was good and well. All of the files lived happily in the cloud and no hardware to worry about. All is good! The few people that need access to this share just run a little script shich in turn stores some authentication details in Windows. This is done via the command “cmdkey”. Nothing special ..read more

My plan is to make this greenhouse totaly independent with it’s own power. “With great power, comes great responsibility” someone said… And great power comes from the sun, in this case. The introduction to this project can be found here: Greenhouse IoT Project – an app in Teams The setup In order to have some power for this setup I wanted to try out solar power. Sourced some new parts, and some used. Got the solar regulator for cheap second hand, and the battery (to store energy from the sun) did I have lying around from some years ago. Just needed to buy a solar panel and some connections for ..read more

Looking for a use-case for IoT, or maybe Apps in Teams? Or both? Me too! About three years ago I made a little greenhouse in my garden. And for a long time I have wanted to have controll over temperatures inside, so I’ve finally made myself this little Greenhouse IoT project to tacle: Inside of this greenhouse there are a lot of things growing, including Tomatoes, cucumbers and some herbs: The purpose of a greenhouse is to have a steady as possible climate for these vegetables. But how can I know how hot it is, or if it’s getting too cold inside this greenhouse? I can manually look at ..read more

But how? On my mobile device? No! In a container, using Docker, Linux, Tmux and AzCopy. Come on, I’ll show you how I do it! The problem Downloading VHDs from Azure can take a lot of time. Especially if they are several hundred gigabytes (or Terabytes!) in size. VHD stands for Virtual Hard Drive, and is essentially a hard disk for virtual machines in the cloud. Why you need to download them may vary, but legal reasons may be one. And where do you store the files temporarily? Do you have 2-3TB of space available on your laptop? I think not… Microsoft has a solution called Databox which will let ..read more

Thanks to the magic of PowerShell and JSON, we can add teams and channels in bulk! Had to do a project lately with a lot of teams and channels that needed to be created in a way that minimizes errors and potential screw-ups. Since I’m all for automating these kinds of tasks, I created this project that I want to share with you! You do need some prerequisites: Some knowledge of both PowerShell and JSON The Teams-module installed on your computer Rights to a tenant to create teams Some teams and channels that needs to be created! Create the JSON-file First, you need a source for what structure ..read more

Since the dawn of Teams we have had individual Teams, and we have had channels. Some years ago, private channels arrived letting us create channels in Teams that could be seen only for those team members that had been given specific access to it. The drawback here was it could only be visible to existing member members and therefore somewhat limiting it’s use. That meant if you had to share the private channel with a member outside of that team, that person would need to have access to everything else in that team. Now there’s a new guy in town, called Shared Channels. This let’s you create ch ..read more

Windows LAPS just recently released to Public Preview. No no, not the old one (legacy Microsoft LAPS: https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=46899). The NEW LAPS. LAPS is an acronym for Local Administrator Password Solution. On Windows-machines there is by default this almighty admin-account that gives you local administrative access to that computer. This can be used in case of emergency where other means of authentication isn’t available, e.g. lost contact with domain controller. But it can also be used for malicious purposes. There are several techniques where passwords can be u ..read more