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+---
+title: "Open stuff"
+date: 2022-07-14T20:47:43-05:00
+draft: true
+---
+I've been interested in open source software for a long time. When I see some proprietary tool that I think looks useful, I enjoy writing my own version of it. These clones are usually fairly limited, but since I am the sole user of most of these projects, that is fine. They are good enough for what I need and want.
+
+## Budgeting:
+
+I have a simple website that stores a table of my transactions. I wrote some basic queries to also have tables by week, month, and year. Prior to this, I wrote an app where I entered the transaction details that would then be sent to myself as an email. I wrote a Google script to scrape my gmail inbox for these emails, and then parse them into a Google spreadsheet. My app was easier to use than entering data into a mobile spreadsheet. While it seems complicated, the underlying programs were fairly simple (~60 lines of Java code for the app, and 25 lines for the Google script). I moved away for this system to both get away from google, and because spreadsheets were not the easiest to work with (I'd rather do the complicated stuff in SQL).
+
+## Blog:
+
+I wrote this website with my own backend for a few reasons. I didn't want to be locked into any system like WordPress. It also gave me a chance to learn more about creating web servers and sites. I wanted something with more power than just a static HTML site, and something that would be fun. My original idea was to create a website where I only posted pictures of bread. I expanded this into much more, where I now have a blog, games, and a few other misc. projects.
+
+## Life Database:
+
+There were a lot of things I wanted to keep track of my progress with, and so I wrote a website to keep track of them, mainly movies I've seen, books I've read, my music collection, and bookmarks. All of these have popular websites that can be used, but again I wanted to keep my data local. I have been finding myself wanting something even simpler, and in 2020 I have just been managing these things in cherrytree (a hierarchical note taking application).
+
+## Games:
+
+I do like to recreate bits of games (simple bits at least). The one that fits best into this blog is Quiz Bunny, which was similar to some ad ridden app game that has the same premise. It took a day to recreate, and it was quite a new program for me. I had not made anything "multiplayer" like it really before. I created the basics of correspondence chess on my website, with a graphical board that you can interact with, however it is still very alpha of a project since the rules of chess are trickier than they seem.
+
+## Home Weather Station
+
+Here we get to the real reason for this blog post. I love weather data, and I wanted a home weather station. I wanted to know my home's temperature, pressure, humidity, and the trend of these things. There are many existing products that do this, starting at about $60 for the most basic of items. That's when I considered just building my own station instead. I purchased a Raspberry Pi Zero W, an Adafruit BME280 sensor, and the needed peripherals (SD card, PSU) for just 40 dollars. I used the Adafruit module to connect to the sensor, and logged its data to a file. Then, I wrote a web server in python that plotted this data, so I can view it whenever from my local network. It works great, and I have much more control over this data and how I want to use it than I could with any consumer device.
+
+This was my first experience with doing any sort of electronics work where I had to create my own circuit. I had to purchase a soldering iron, some wire spools, and other things needed as well for this hobby. These did bring the price up to more than just a consumer device, but now I am past the hurdle of not having supplies. There are other electronics projects I want to tinker with in the future, with the next being setting up a plant monitoring station.
+
+I love software and computing, but I also want to branch out. The reason I got into programming in high school was because it was free and infinite. Now that I have some disposable income, I can now search for hobbies that are in the "cheap" category, and the hardware community has a lot of help for beginners (knowing programming well helps even more). Electronics is also easy to do in my apartment, in contrast to other things like woodworking.
+
+![A Raspberry PI zero](/img/pi_zero.png)
+
+## Content Note
+
+I'm planning on posting about weekly, inspired by #100DaysToOffload (which is 100 posts in a year). I am aiming for 50 blog posts a year at the moment. My next post will probably be about this.