The foot in question

Persistence, mostly.

Learning the word ‘in’ and what pointing at the other room/snapping fingers means was the first step. Took a while, but enough picking up/putting down, blocking and gentle scooting got the point home.

After that, get them ‘in’ and start making food on the counter, not direct to bowls on the floor. When a cat crosses the boundary, stop serving up and put them back in either by command or physically. Be belligerent about it if you need to be. Resume/repeat until everyone’s dishes are ready.

When ready, I call the first one in by name and put bowls down. The rest quickly follow.

You may find that the cat with the most bossiness/brains/food drive helps keep the others back on pain of biffing, cause they know intrusion means food delay.

We have a gang of 3 with occasional visitors. They have been taught to wait in the living room while breakfast is prepared, because being mobbed at 5am is a trip hazard.

Still, the orange insists on at least some form of rebellion, and will wait patiently with one foot distinctly over the line between rooms.

They are between builds.

B41 stable has been out for ages with multiplayer support. It’s the current version and what you get if you don’t opt in to experiential builds.

On unstable builds, the devs remove multiplayer initially until they think it’s good enough. B42 unstable is in active development and just recently added multiplayer support.

B42 is still a bug-ridden crapshoot though, stick with 41 if you want to play online.

Aye it’s on the list to try & potentially swap out when time allows. Probably over the holidays - no work until the new year after the 23rd, so no excuse really :)

It’s fine, did the job for me at the time. Just wanted the ad and nasty blocking. Keeping it and the filters up to date is easy.

Now have a pfSense box with pfBlocker-NG, which does essentially the same thing. Also runs Snort as an additional layer, and makes penning in IoT stuff possible.

Rclone works with many providers, and allows for encryption.

Revision mod has been out for ages, is free, and does a great overhaul of the original game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/397550/Deus_Ex_Revision/

Innr kit has been great here, and recently affordable. The bulbs are little workhorses and have required exactly no extra attention since first connection, even across a house move.

Setup is ZHA/Conbee II. Old now but still all smiles.

Well it’s exactly what I asked for, can’t argue 😂

We settled on Puck for the name. It rhymes with what’s said when weird noises come from its direction…

Ademco Vista 6139 keypad.

As suggested by others, this will be wired back to a bigger box somewhere in the building. Any monitoring devices like door contacts will also be wired back there. Look for any references to the installer - it may still be under a monitoring & maintenance contract.

If no contract or out of contract, look up some manuals for this series and try getting into engineer mode. I think the default with these is 4110 800 iirc. If you can get engineer, you can put in new user codes for… using your system. It’s likely the engineer code has been changed though.

So break in. Most boxes are equipped with a tamper switch, so it is likely to scream if you remove the cover. If you decide to do so, switch off the mains supply first. Then remove the cover and immediately disconnect the battery to kill it.

From here, ID the unit and find the installer or engineer manual. The user manual is useless at this stage. Familiarise yourself with it.

When you are ready to play, pop the battery back on, restore power and then go immediately back to the keypad to press * and # together. This should reset the engineer code to the above, but retain the rest of the current programming.

These are old systems and a lot of this is from memory, so YMMV.

Alternatively, get the codes off the previous owner or replace it with something new. This one could be over 20 years old; vistas started in the 90s.

Why not. I would love to see your detached robotic ass.

I printed special little stilts to raise one of our tables the 10mm extra it needed to be able to go under without getting wedged. It still tries fornicating with the cat tree - a different problem to solve.

Never lost it’s ass though, one to look out for there.

Same setup here, with two little Lenovo boxes. HA gets one all to itself.

The hardware doesn’t completely go to waste though. It’s handling all the cameras so having all the CPU, RAM & storage immediately to hand for expansion is great. No need to pass through peripherals either - just plug em in. If it goes to shit, putting a display and keyboard on it is no problem.

It would definitely be a size thing for adding Ethernet (PoE or otherwise) to small boards like these. The ones I am using are already bigger than they ought to be - the bottom half is just a glorified serial interface and power input for USB. The esp plugs into this through pin/header. If I were less lazy, they could be about half the thickness in a final product. No PoE I suppose also keeps them cheap, which is always good for me. The casings were my first ‘proper’ design and entry into resin printing.

The Tapo kit I have found to be a good balance of price, features and quality. I have a Tapo C310 mounted outdoors at another building, which has done great in all weathers. Initial setup does require the app/service last time I checked, but it can be made to serve RTSP locally after that. Very good for the ~£30 price point.

Eggs, baskets, and lessons being taught about how it’s not a good idea to heavily skew their ratio.

Ok so the combination is:

• This camera board
• This external antenna
• This project
• A shell I designed myself in SketchUp (skp download). Note that’s not the final version, as I lost some design files.

And the finished item:

All assembled, they will give a decent enough feed to frigate for the basics. Just don’t expect miracles in the resolution or framerate departments. 3fps does fine for my use case of tracking critters.

Gladly. I’ll collate a few bits later - time for work.

New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.

Thank you!

For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.

WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.

Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.

A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor: