Why Your Shiny New Enterprise SATA Drive Refuses to Power Up

TL;DR

Modern enterprise SATA drives (WD Ultrastar, HGST Helium, Seagate Exos, Toshiba MG) use pin 3 of the SATA power connector as a "power disable" signal. Standard desktop PSUs supply 3.3 V on this pin, which tells the drive to stay...

Adding a Page View Counter to a Grav CMS Site

If you run a Grav CMS site and want to show visitors how many times an article has been read — today and all time — this is how to do it entirely self-hosted, with no JavaScript trackers or third-party analytics services involved.

The end result lo...

What is AppArmor and Why Should You Care?

If you manage a Linux server and you have ever had a permission denied error that made absolutely no sense — the file existed, the ownership was correct, you were running as root — there is a reasonable chance AppArmor was the culprit. It certainly was f...

Going Paperless: Self-Hosted Document Management with Paperless-NGX

Every year the same ritual: hunting through years of email to find last year's home insurance policy, the car MOT certificate, or proof of an Amazon return. It works — barely — but it is not a system. It is a memory test.

Paperl...

Adding an Indicator Stalk to Tesla Model 3 Highland - A retrofit guide

Quick Specs:

• Cost: £142 delivered (AliExpress)
• Install Time: ~45 minutes
• Difficulty: Medium (requires basic tools and patience)
• Tools Needed: All included in kit
• Reversible: Yes
• Warranty Impact: Potentiall...

If you want to access the Admin menu, the password on the sticker is incorrect.

Introduction

The Technicolor DGA4134NLK Broadband Router is a cheap router supplied by a couple of broadband providers here in the UK. If you would want to utilise it's WiFi capabilities but you need to switch-off it...

Getting Generation 1 Devices to Work in 2023

Introduction

I have a few LightwaveRF Gen1 dimmer switches which I used to control using Domoticz and an RFXCOM 433MHz dongle. After changing over to use Home Assistant I thought that my days of controlling them was over since the official Home As...

A faulty device buzzes and the Manual Status Button Just Flashes - How to Fix

Introduction

These AN157-3 Z-Wave socket outlets are very good but they only switch ON/OFF and don't have any on-board power metering. They are able to switch power at full load, have a programmable status light and ar...

Updating Docker and its zwavejs2mqtt container on a RPI3 running Buster no longer works

Note that this was done many years ago on a very early version of the Pi.

Introduction

I use Home Assistant with a remote Raspberry Pi 3 fitted with an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle running the excell...

Disassembling a Bosch ME7.1 ECU with IDA Pro

I did these tutorials many years ago, October 2007 to be exact.

Here I will teach you how to disassemble a Bosch ME7.5.5 ECU using IDA Pro. When you are presented with a new type of ECU binary image, you have to disassemble the image multiple times be...

Setting up a 2022 Raspberry Pi 3B or Pi 4 for 1-wire Temperature Measurement

This is a very old and out-of-date article

Introduction

I use several 1-wire temperature probes (DS18B20) to measure a few things in my home set-up, mainly my central heating and solar hot water panels. I have them co...

What? New Battery Not Recognised?

Introduction

My home set-up consists of two parallel LUX LXP3600 inverters with two banks (strings) of six PylonTech US3000 Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo) 3.5kWh battery banks. This was giving me a usable 18kWh of battery storage to run my house from. The batte...

ECUFix is now at version 6.4.1.1 Updated 27th March 2022

General

If you wanted to modify your Bosch Motronic M3.8/M5x/ME7.1/7.5 but couldn't get the checksums fixed or, more importantly, needed to pay someone to fix them for you, here's the solution….

ECUFIX

How Easy Is It To Use?

We...

A Police Lotus Esprit

One of my friends sent me this photograph.

I believe this picture is courtesy of Chris Ward. It was found at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/steve.warren/frames.htm — whether it's still there, I don't know.

I wonder if it's true? Probably not….

Has the guy on the bike put t...

Last modified: 25 July 2004

Introduction

I've used to be a DJ and worked with a Pioneer DJM-500 mixer for a number of years. However, I was irritated by the fact it didn't have a mic-switch nor an automatic talk-over fader.

Here's the DJM-500 in its coffin (click to enlarge):

And here's th...

This was done for a client circa 1998. My customer had a long pipe where at one end four transducers were pulsed with a user-definable waveform and, at the other end, there were another four transducers that listened to the resulting sound pulse.

The project required a custom 4-channel digital to...

RS232 cable wiring diagrams and pinout configurations for connecting computers and communication equipment.

Introduction

I hope you like this. If you have ever wanted to connect to PCs or any two pieces of communications equipment together, it's easy to get confused about what connection goes wh...

These are old Lotus Esprit GT3 articles I created many years ago. I originally created them using Microsoft's FrontPage web authoring suite. I have migrated them across to Grav using markdown as the new page language. The content was scraped from the WayBack machine, so the photographic quality may...

Subaru Imprezza Ice-Skating

This page is absolutely years old. I thought it was funny at the time but can you imagine what the guy who drove this felt like? I bet he ended up feeling cold!

For your information, changes were last made on: 11th February 2018

To help me with the Lotus Esprit protocol, I spent some 10 minutes with a Vetronix Tech1 scanner connected to my Lotus Esprit at the beginning of August 1999. This showed me how to initiate a conversation with the ECU.

FreeSca...