Notes
Blog
Restoration diaries, workshop notes and the occasional deep dive.
Reading a LINZ NETZ Smart Meter in Home Assistant with an RTL-SDR Dongle
LINZ NETZ smart meters broadcast their readings by radio every five seconds. An RTL-SDR dongle on a Home Assistant Raspberry Pi receives them, with no cloud and no hardware at the meter: live power draw and billing-grade import and export readings for the Energy dashboard.
A GaggiMate for the Gaggia Classic: Installation, First Shots and a Self-Test Profile
Three days took the restored Gaggia Classic from bimetal thermostats to a GaggiMate Pro: the installation and its traps, a sensor that read 14 bar, why the stock profile does not stop at 36 g, and a self-test profile that turned the sensor into a leak detector. With a two-page quick-start guide.
Restoring a Gaggia Classic: From a EUR 200 Find to the First Shot
Around 50 hours of work took a second-hand Gaggia Classic from a EUR 200 find to the first espresso: the order of work, the parts that were actually needed, what twenty years of scale look like inside, and what I would do in the same order again.