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Inspecting COM+ components from PowerShell

As part of the datacenter-wide visibility upgrade I’m working on for a customer, I’m setting up monitoring one of their legacy network applications. This application has no logging support whatsoever, and upgrade path available: the original developers have published a new version 10+ years ago, and have no interest for supporting it apart from (sometimes) replying to support tickets. Thus, to set up at least some basic metrics, the solution I came up with is to monitor the COM+ components that work together to make it up...

Measuring a KY-040 rotary encoder

I’m doing a project, a very simple one: it’s a sous vide cooker. The details don’t matter, as in this article we are going to focus on a single component: the KY-040 rotary encoder. If you are here, you have most likely just bought a KY-040 clone from China, and are looking into how to hook it up to your Arduino. This is a bit of a deviation from the usual highly technical and specific content of this blog, but there’s a good reason for it: I spent 15 minutes googling about this, and all I got was some generic copy-pasted (often clearly stolen) code that mostly - albeit very inefficiently - worked...

Hacking a tap water purifier

A few months ago, my father bought himself a water purifier. It’s a quite convenient and eco-friendly device which filters tap water, and optionally cools it and carbonates it, eliminating the need of buying bottled water entirely. The company that sold it to him also sold him a stand-alone faucet, as a replacement for his old one. This new piece of hardware is actually two devices in one: it has pipes for cold and hot water, like a standard mixer faucet, and also an additional pipe with no valve, directly connected to the water purifier...