Julien ARNAUD (17)

2024 Energy Restrospective

Notable events May 9th, a first batch of 4 solar panel where installed on the first roof (instead of the floor) October 25th, a second batch of 4 solar panels where installed on the second roof (instead of the floor) During winter 2023-2024 I used the heatpump of the car. For 2024-2025, I stopped heating the car unless defrosting is necessary. Overall solar production Installation of the first batch of solar panel on the roof increased production drastically, as these were previously in the shade most of the day. The…

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High end multi-room sound system (offline/no-cloud)

Goals of the system In plain english : It allows me to play music of my Android phone on Spotify, or play a Youtube video on my Debian laptop, or start mixing on my XDJ-XZ, or play a movie on the Chromecast 4K in the movie room and... have the sound automatically get out of each and every speakers of the house, with state of the art quality on each of them. Keys to reach the goals Components of the system Audio routing The audio routing goes as follows :…

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House's solar and monitoring system

Here are the specs : Monitoring is done via Home Assistant running in a Docker container, itself running in an LXC container on Proxmox. Most sensors communicate in zigbee, including the Linky via a tiny self-powered module. To communicate with the solar inverter, a Solarman Integration via Wifi is used. The first 4x 435W string is installed on the roof, but the 6x 400W are still on the ground for now, as the hardest part is climbing on the roof with large fragile objects of 20 Kg each and not…

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Everyday laptop, and computer history

Until around 2007 [0], I was a big fan of powerful desktops as my daily driver. At that point my computer was liquid-cooled PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5 Ghz. This was a beast and I loved it. I then switched to a MacBook Pro 15" Penryn complemented by a NAS to compensate for lack of local storage. I kept on the laptop + NAS train for a while : more recently with availability of 4TB SSDs I went to a laptop-only setup. My previous laptop was the IdeaPad Pro 5 (5800U,…

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Machine learning desktop

I built a new computer to play with some machine learning. It uses what seems to be the best scoring case for airflow and temperature : Fractal Torrent Compact. The full setup is : The 4090 is capped to 65% TDP as going any further quickly hits drastrictly diminishing returns (anything above 75% should be considered OC). When capped, the card only runs at about 60° ! That thing really is a crazy object and product. During training the computer draws about 400W at the wall. Which sits perfectly in…

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