Blog

Builds, projects, and notes from the foothills. Things figured out the hard way.

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My boiler monitor kept going quiet, and the network was fine.

July 23, 2026

A remote ESP32 on a wood boiler kept going silent, and the link was not the problem. It was running out of memory. How I stopped a monitor from quietly failing at its one job.

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Pool Controller

July 08, 2026

A WiFi controller for my parents’ pool - filter pump and solar heating, from concept to a DIN-rail module running Tasmota. Archive repost from 2020.

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Why my ESP32 firmware speaks Lua

May 15, 2026

Embedding Lua 5.3 in thesada-fw so rules change without a reflash, and the door stays open for block-based programming later. The reasoning, the API, the gotchas.

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I built a shell for my ESP32 over MQTT

April 28, 2026

A CLI over MQTT means I can read files, push config, trigger updates, and reboot a microcontroller from anywhere. Here is what that looks like.

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Why I Built My Own Wood Boiler Monitor

April 16, 2026

How a cold house in rural Alberta turned into a custom ESP32 firmware project. The story behind thesada-fw.

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Deploying a Jekyll Blog to Cloudflare Pages

April 07, 2026

How to set up a static Jekyll blog with the just-the-docs theme and deploy it to Cloudflare Pages from a GitHub repository. Free hosting, automatic SSL, basically zero maintenance.