Projects

Welcome to the Projects section of PHP Systems Blog. This is where ideas turn into reality - whether it’s building custom electronics, setting up automation systems, crafting 3D-printed prototypes, or self-hosting entire services. Every project here is something I’ve built, tested, and documented so you can learn from both my successes and mistakes.

More Kestra Automation

While I am working through some issues and they may well be the subject of another post, this time I thought I'd shamelessly extend what I have done before extended with some of Christian Lempa's files.

Kestra webhooks and Home assistant

Welcome back to another blog post on Kestra. Starting from where I left off last time, I'm going to try to fix a few little niggles I had with the time based triggers.

Automating Ansible playbooks with Kestra

Recently, after watch Christian Lempa videos, I have started playing about with Kestra. Kestra is a work flow orcestration platform to schedule playbooks or tirgger them when I want them. Example using unpackerr.

Smart doorbell failure #2?

Following on from my failure to detect my doorbell button being pushed, I considered a few different alternatives solutions. The first solution to spring to mind was to use a zigbee button.

Monitoring DMARC with Docker

In this post, I deploy a docker container via docker compose and ansible to read my dmarc reports.

Using ansible to deploy a gitlab runner.

After deploying watchtower to one of my docker instances, I noticed that it was having issues with restarting the container. The actual fault turned out to be the networking with portainer, but in the meantime, I wrote an ansible playbook to redeploy / restart the container.

Deploying Plex with docker and ansible

After deploying watchtower to one of my docker instances, I noticed that it was having issues with restarting the container. The actual fault turned out to be the networking with portainer, but in the meantime, I wrote an ansible playbook to redeploy / restart the container.

Wireless doorbell hacking

I bought a wireless doorbell from B&M and the doorbell works great. I have always been interested in decoding radio, so this gave me a chance to try this out. My end goal here is to be able to press the doorbell and have home assistant act on the button press.

Gitlab pipelines

As a later post will show, I've been using gitlab pipelines to validate some of my code for me. As a security conscious person, I've been interested in building security in to pipelines.

eMotion and Modbus

As I write this, Paul Hibbert released this video on youtube 3 days ago. The video features a very smart sensor doing presence detection. The company linknlink were new to me and following the recommendation from Paul, I bought a couple of eMotion sensors.

About the author

Tim Wilkes is a UK-based security architect with over 15 years of experience in electronics, Linux, and Unix systems administration. Since 2021, he's been designing secure systems for a telecom company while indulging his passions for programming, automation, and 3D printing. Tim shares his projects, tinkering adventures, and tech insights here - partly as a personal log, and partly in the hopes that others will find them useful.

Want to connect or follow along?

LinkedIn: [phpsytems]
Twitter / X: [@timmehwimmy]
Mastodon: [@timmehwimmy@infosec.exchange]


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