Coaxing a manufacturer unsupported reverse cycle air conditioner back into being a smart device

After the pandemic, we decided to upgrade to a larger house. I sold the old one, and we moved into a nicer, larger house. Whilst I've since done some upgrades to the new house, it still has the two reverse cycle air conditioners that it came with.

These are Samsung "The Triangle"  AR09FSSSCWKN and AR24FSSSCWKN units.

Inititally when I moved into the house, I contacted Samsung about how to connect them to the wifi.. and got sent around in circles. Try their SmartThings app. Try the old app. The old app just would not work...

Home Assistant and Tuya - which path did I choose?

Tuya licenses an IoT platform that is VERY popular with the OEMs of various IoT products. If you buy something from a big box IoT store, ALDI, etc., chances are in a lot of cases, it's going to be powered by Tuya technology.

Initially they used chips from Espressif, and these were easily reflashed to other firmwares, but more recently they have moved to using different SoCs which either require physical connection to re-flash OR cannot be reflashed and need to be replaced if you wish to use different firmware.

Tuya does provide a cloud integration for Home Assistant, "Tuya", but it is a cloud integration, which means that to control your local devices, you need to reach out to the Tuya cloud and back to control things.

I don't know about you, but the idea of needing to reach out to the cloud and back to be able to turn something on and off seems counter intuitive. Additionally, the official Tuya cloud integration only supports some devices. So once you connect it to your Tuya account, you might find some devices are seen, but HA cannot provide any control of the device. Work is being undertaken over time for the cloud integration to have broader device support, but it's slow going.

Firewall upgrade

After noting that my long serving Asus RT-AC5300 running Merlin AsusWRT had gone EoL (and had long since had its WiFi duties taken over by two UniFi WiFi 6 Lites), I decided to dip my toe into perhaps a more advanced setup, and set about configuring a small mini-server to host a containerisation and virtualisation solution for my networking needs. It's working, but it's also still a work in progress.

Trying to install HACS on HomeAssistant OS 2026 / v17 I got sent around in loops until...

I have Home Assistant - and at the time of trying to initially install HACS I had:

Installation method Home Assistant OS
Core 2026.2.2
Supervisor 2026.02.1
Operating System 17.1
Frontend 20260128.6

I'd been trying to install HACS for ages. When clicking web buttons to install it into my HAOS instance, it would redirect from the HACS site, to my Home Assistant instance, but continually say it couldn't find the app.

Lots of web matches said you could run the get.hacs.xyz script through shell, but didn't recommend it for OS version of HA.

I noticed the repository in the HACS site in the URL being passed to my HA instance was:  

https://github.com/hacs/addons

... so I went to my HA settings, went to Apps, went to Install App, went to the meatball menu in the top right, selected Repositories, and then added the above URL.

I then went back to the HACS website, used the add link, and it found the app!

 

How I do backups: rsync is my friend :)

There are many many fancy backup programs out there, that have all sorts of cool features. I remember, a long time ago, using ntbackup (which saved my bacon and that of the business I worked for at the time), and later Backup Exec. Of course, now, there's cloud cloud cloud all over the place.. What if, however, you just want to backup from one place to another without a subscription fee?

Well, it took awhile, and the script's evolved over time, but I presently use rsync for backups. In conjunction with a filesystem that supports hard links, I can store date stamped copies of a given source, where the backup disk only stores changed files between copies, saving disk space - but all the files are ready for direct access within their respective directory heirarchies.

Your mileage may vary, you may indeed find fancier scripts, but this one works for me :)

Speaking GCode directly to your 3D printer in Linux when it requires a custom baud rate

I recently impulse bought a 3D printer from Aldi. The Cocoon Create Model Maker HE170707. It's a rebrand of the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Mini. I'm slowly learning how to use it, and how to interact with it.

To date, I've been slicing in Cura and then exporting to SD card, then loading that into the printer, but today I started playing around with sending GCode directly to the printer. Eventually I want to update the version of Marlin it's running, but before I do that, I want to see what settings/version etc. the printer is running.

Cura can see the printer, and can send it basic requests - but it won't show me the printer's responses to particular GCodes, which I want to see. The inbuilt USB to serial adapter the printer uses is locked at 250,000 baud and this isn't supported by minicom.

I did some Googling, and in the end, I found out that I could instead use picocom. It's a very simple, cut down serial terminal package.

WARNING: Don't send commands to your printer if you don't know what they do. Read the instructions first. You change things at your own risk!

Who's that knocking? SSH connection attempts...

I have a dedicated server overseas that I use for hosting various things. It's handy to have something that lives in a remote data centre, separate from all the local goings on. It is, however, as a LAMP stack server, out there on the internet, and folks do "knock on the door" frequently.

I've disabled passworded logins, changed the default SSH port (I know in and of itself, it's not a solution, but it does reduce a lot of the brain dead noise) and firewalled off all but the services which must be accessible externally for the server to function.

I still get hits to the OpenSSH server.

Setting up Linux to automatically launch a browser in a "kiosk" session

At work, we have some monitoring systems which we like to display on separate screens. These screens are connected to old computers which have been reinstalled with Windows. We have them set to auto-launch the displays, but it took some fiddling to get the chrome windows launched and positioned correctly. These instructions use xorg - I'm still not sure on Wayland... will be great when they figure out quick solution for "remote desktop".

Bringing it all together..

Protecting against ransomware - is this possibly a different way of thinking about it in the SOHO space?

Recently my folks got an email from their ISP (Westnet) scaring them, thinking they'd been hacked (it turns out an old Westnet user database had been compromised, along with cleartext usernames and passwords... oopsies?).

Before I figured out what it was, I was thinking suspicious activity had been detected on their accounts and was worried about whether or not they'd backed up recently... then my thoughts turned to cryptoware and how it basically spreads out to whatever it touches and encrypts everything (had someone else hit by a bug recently - and I'm moving them and their formerly Windows XP computer to Lubuntu as they only need Windowsish looking email, web browsing and printing).

Anyway.. long setup aside, I was thinking, that perhaps the best way to deal with backups and cryptoware, was to have the system that needed to be backed up make itself available to an authorised backup storage provider by some restricted and secured means (over a LAN or encrypted link). That backup storage provider could be prodded by the client system to perform a pull, but the client would never have direct, unrestricted access to the backup server's archives.

Nokia N95, Rhythmbox and MTP support

Using Linux on the desktop as my primary OS, I very rarely use the software device manufacturers intend someone to use as part of my daily interaction with the hardware I have.

Case in point, loading music onto my Nokia N95 from Rhythmbox. The Nokia N95 appears to support MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) but then the fun begins.