Pyssel

When looking for a reliable tracking and security solution for our boat, I wanted something robust with professional-grade capabilities rather than basic consumer gadgets. Teltonika’s hardware ecosystem caught my eye, and for this project, I opted for the  FTC134  tracker. As usual with industrial or specialized hardware, the online documentation is massive and split across various wiki pages.To save you some time hunting through forums, here is a quick walkthrough of how I got mine up and running, connected it via Proxmox, and set up basic input triggers and arming logic.

In my earlier posts about Lightweight DIY Linux Server Monitoring I used a small Bash script and MQTT Auto-Discovery to get server metrics into Home Assistant (HA) without any manual sensor setup. The same idea works very well for something else I wanted to keep an eye on: the speed of my internet connection. This time the data source is  the command line client for Bredbandskollen. It measures download, upload and latency against a nearby test server, and prints the result as a single line of text, perfect for a script. The script runs on my Proxmox host , publishes the result to the Mosquitto broker, and HA creates a device with all the sensors by itself.

In my previous post, Lightweight DIY Linux Server Monitoring , I shared a simple, dependency-free Bash script  designed to monitor Linux environments in a  lightweight way  and push metrics like disk usage, memory, CPU load, and upgradable " apt " packages to an external MQTT broker. While that setup worked great for a standalone MQTT setup with Node-RED I wanted to take it a step further. In this follow-up, we will upgrade the script to seamlessly integrate with Home Assistant(HA) using MQTT and the Auto-Discovery function. Instead of manually setting up sensors in Home Assistant, the script automatically creates its own device and sensors in Home Assistant the first time it runs and each day if something gone wrong !

For a while ago I migrated my Home Assistant environment to Proxmox and in the search for a good server monitoring software I had to test the HA Proxmox integration . As said its lets you monitor your Proxmox VE nodes, virtual machines, containers and storage, in Home Assistant, and exposes control actions if your Proxmox permissions allows it. The instructions are nice but I will add some info to make it even better 😉 A very lightweight version, bash script, MQTT, Node-RED, that will monitor all your Linux servers is found here !

 Updated 2026-10-03 ! I have done several posts Blogging about how to keep an old MacBook Air(MBA), mid 2011(A1369), with SSD disk "alive". I have used the fantastic software package OpenCore Legacy patcher to upgrade the Mac to the latest Mac OS.  A while ago i tested Mac OS  Sequoia (15.3), on the mentioned Mac, but I had to admit that it was to much for the 14 year old companion. I really like the Mac and everything works, after a battery change , so it ended up with installing  Ubuntu latest LTS (UOS) ! (Above link is now UOS 26.04 LTS which was installed as an upgrade from 24.04 without any problem) Ubuntu on  Mac Mini (2018) and MacBookAir (2010)  ?

Updated 2026-09-10 !  !! Another SW solution is available for RPi 5 here !  using the same HW. Thanks to Thomas, (the guy with the nice marine interface board ) ,  it's now possible  to decode, one way, the SeaTalk1(ST1) sentences in a pretty simple way. You just  use OpenPlotter(OP) and/or SignalK(SK) and an  Optocoupler . The thing that made it, is that Thomas   has released a "how to" and  Python source code , that will read the data from a GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi, (RPi), and format it so the standard parser in SignalK can translate it to SignalK delta format. It is then  available as NMEA 0183. It's even possible to send the data in to a NMEA 2000 network, with a proper hardware interface. Don't miss Dons bidirectional solution found here ! 

During the years it has been a lot of tinkering..... So in this post I will make a list with links to products, software and blogposts describing my daily use. Since the family is Apple users it started up with HomeKit and an Apple TV as the Home hub..... Now I'm moving towards the new standard => Matter over Thread .

Updated 2026-09-01 As a part of one of my project,  the ultimate Weather site ? Weather34 , I needed a WEB-host with PHP. Log on, with ssh/terminal to the host,  in this case hostname "pws01",  and update the OS(skip " sudo " if using " root ") with sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade -y sudo apt clean go on and install the Apache server with sudo apt install apache2

Updated 2026-08-06 ! I have got some questions installing, just,  Signal K (SK) so will do a summary with links. Signal K is the hub to receive data, from different devices in different data formats, and send it on to different equipment, or databases, in different formats. Most common for standard marine equipment are the old NMEA 0183 and the newer NMEA 2000 protocol which is also handled.  Besides the SK "hub" function developers  have  created  plugins  for different purposes. This is due to that  SK is open-source ! Sharing is caring ! In this post you can check the devices I'm using connected to the SK server and also my setup.