In the summer of 2026 I had a lot of free time, so I decided to work on some personal DIY projects I had been wanting to do. And let’s just say I was VERY busy this summer.
Network
First I upgraded internet in my house by getting UniFi access points and pulling CAT6 ethernet cables through the walls.
Homeserver
I then upgraded the homeserver to also host the UniFi server to control everything about the network in the home.
I also now host on the homeserver: drawio, Obsidian with Syncthing, a reverse proxy using NPM, and made a quick status check dashboard using Glance.
TV repair
As a fun one: a friend of mine’s Samsung OLED TV broke (it didn’t turn on anymore) and was going to be thrown away, so I picked it up and took it apart. I checked for any shorts, found that there were none, so I figured the problem was with the data cables going to the panel itself. I proceeded to test if it was the left or right side of the panel (the PCB is bridged in the middle), and found that it indeed was the bridge between the left and right panel circuit. I then taped off a couple of pins using non-conductive tape and trial-and-errored until the TV did indeed turn on, which was massive progress. But the screen was now entirely white and all text was unreadable, so I tried more/different pins to tape off and eventually I got it to fully work with colour. It was still flickering the screen in the top left corner, so I did some more trial and error and ended up with a basically perfect working panel.
Arcade build
I took apart my brother’s old broken laptop, which had been unused since 2018, and salvaged all the working parts and made a fun, fast little wooden/cardboard casing for it. And got it to work again WITH functioning battery, sound, full IO and WIFI. I then flashed it with Batocera Linux to turn it into an arcade machine for emulating things like the Game Boy, PSP, SNES, N64, Commodore, Sega and a lot of other old classic consoles. I plan later to actually make an arcade machine out of wood for it.
Home automation
Part 1: Home automation, Home Assistant. I have been using Home Assistant at home running on a Raspberry Pi for a while now, but only for basics. Since we now have a house battery at home, I decided to put some time into refining our Home Assistant. I added all entities like our water boiler (this required hooking up and flashing an ESP32 microcontroller to the heat pump system, read-only though), digital meter, home battery system (signEnergy), solar panels and other appliances.
I made some automations and controls.
I lastly made a clean quick dashboard to see the exact energy usage of our house and control that with a handful of other things, and made sure our house is now fully self-sufficient.
Kiosk
To use the new dashboard I made, we need a small touchscreen kiosk. I first thought to just buy an old Android tablet, BUT I remembered my old touchscreen notebook from 2014, so I found it in the attic and made sure it still worked. I flashed it with Debian and put Openbox on it, and made sure it autolaunched on start in kiosk mode and auth, so there’s no need to put in login information. Now that I verified it all worked, it was time to take apart the laptop to turn it into a kiosk touchscreen.
I took it apart, disconnected the keyboard, case, hinges etc. and folded it, so now it’s slimmer, lighter, smaller and it’s a touchscreen. A FULLY free solution that gave lost hardware a new life.
WiFi CSI
My last project of the summer was something I had been wanting to do for a year and deserves its own full page. In short, I had 2 old Telenet APs laying around that I got given by my old landlord for helping him upgrade the internet. I used these 2 APs for a CSI project using Atheros.
I built my own firmware using Atheros OpenWRT to run on the Telenet Netgear hardware. After that finally worked, I used 1 of the routers as a transmitter (TX) and 1 as a receiver (RX). I then made the TX send out a constant stream of packets. The RX receives these and sees the CSI data, which shows how disrupted the signal was. The more channels, the more accurate this is. This AP has 2x2 with 2.4GHz. So using this information I could calculate, using Python scripts, the static disturbance and the non-static disturbance. This way I could basically derive if something is moving in between the 2 APs. As you could have guessed, yes, this is basically a motion detector. And because it’s WiFi signals it works BETWEEN WALLS. Yes, this way I can detect if a person is present and moving through walls. Now I only got this accurate enough to detect motion, presence, and actions like waving, bending down, jumping left and right — through walls, yes.
After I got this to work I moved on to 5GHz, since this has 3x3 channels and would drastically improve accuracy, or so I thought. Yes, I got a lot more information now, but everything was way more sensitive and was harder to work with. If someone was downstairs moving it would also detect as “motion”, so it was hard to test. A moving fan inside of a PC would also trigger it. In theory this could be accurate enough to measure the breathing rate of a person, but in practice this is a long way from that. Since moving left or right was triggering a million other things, I had to implement a calibration system where I mapped out a static floor and walls and by standing somewhere could mark a “left”, “middle” and “right” area. Now by moving into any of these mapped areas it would detect as moving that direction. This works a lot better, BUT now APs can’t be moved until the next calibration.
Anyways, this project is still incomplete and will have its own page on this website, and eventually I will release a research paper about this and open source the project. For now, see the WiFi CSI project page — full details are still pending.