Business – Enes Essays

Smart Home Dashboard with Home Assistant, MQTT, Certbot and Nginx Proxy

Home automation, monitoring and control requires a user interface that is easy to use. There are numerous commercial solutions for this.

If you have high requirements for data security and privacy, a self-hosted smart home solution is the way to go. I tried a few open-source solutions and ended up happy with “Home Assistant”. In this post I want to explain how to get a minimal instance of Home Assistant, MQTT, Certbot and Nginx Proxy up and running with Docker Compose.

Balcony Power Plant in Schwetzingen

Until a few months ago, I was happy with my previous electricity provider. A short time later, however, came the nasty surprise. My monthly fee went up from 42€ to 66€. This meant that the previous contract was no longer attractive.

I want to generate my energy with the power of the sun in the future

I’ve been interested in having my own solar panels on the balcony for a while. I have so much unused space. Due to the energy crisis, bureaucratic hurdles in Germany for balcony power plants were removed. The stars were right and I took this opportunity to become a little more self-sufficient.

Unity: Cloud Connected Digital Twin

Our work in the XR Venture at SAP continues to bear fruit today. Recently, Unity released a video that included a snippet of our development (see 00:28).

A somewhat older article here also describes a bit more in detail what’s behind it. I summarized more details about the XR Cloud in this post.

Kintsugi and its meaning today

“Kintsugi” means “golden joinery”. It’s the japanese way of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with golden joins. Kintsugi is not only an activity, but also a way of life and a mindset.

Breaking things are an essential part of the lifecycle of objects. My passion is repairing things which break in every day life. Plastic is an essential part of our modern day lives, but throwing plastic into the trash or waters is polluting our world. I see local-recycling and local-manufacturing as the solution to save our planet and live the Kintsugi lifestyle.

Local Recycling: Precious Plastic Shredder Kit

I am convinced that we can solve the global plastic problem only with local measures. For this reason, I have spent the last weeks/months experimenting on various projects and am working prototypically on a DIY recycling plant that I can operate at home to extract new raw materials from plastic waste that accumulates daily from various packages.

I have long tried to build a plastic shredder at home with the least amount of resources. I had the idea of applying heat to plastic, softening it and thus reducing the size of the plastic with less force. Unfortunately, my first prototype failed.

After some thinking, I decided to order a Precious Plastics Shredder Kit with all the necessary parts already included. I have to assemble the shredder and can start with it. In 2-4 weeks the shredder will arrive. I am looking forward to my little recycling business!

On-Site Experience and Design Thinking

When you work in pure developer teams, you realize the following: You forget that you are influencing the lives of “real” people with your development. SAP is one of the largest providers of business solutions. What we do in our development teams impacts the work and lives of very many.