ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hey-Oh! Its been a while! Even though I’ve been locked at home for the past year, I haven’t published any new content in forever. Well, life has been pretty boring so I haven’t come across much worth sharing, and I’m also lazy. But I do have something today finally worth blerg’n about. So anyway, away we go!

So, in my not so distant past, I was rolling out Windows AppLocker to our organization, I did get it out to most sites, but other stuff came up, other projects, yada yada yada, and I never got it all the way finished. Now, its back on the todo list, and one of my peers is working on finishing it up. Anyway, I am assisting with the KB transfer, and I’m also helping to troubleshoot issues that come up as he moves forward. Well a few days back I was helping him out, and I was on the users computer, who was having a program being blocked that should not have been. It was based on a recent exception we had made, so I wanted to verify the new policy was in fact being applied from within the GPO. So, I started using the AppLocker PowerShell cmdlets. Long story short, what a disappointment those are.

Get-Command -Name "*AppLocker*"

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Function        Get-AppLockerFileInformation                       1.0        AppLocker
Function        Get-AppLockerPolicy                                1.0        AppLocker
Function        New-AppLockerPolicy                                1.0        AppLocker
Function        Set-AppLockerPolicy                                1.0        AppLocker
Function        Test-AppLockerPolicy                               1.0        AppLocker

Wow, a lot to choose from there right. Also I think AppLocker came out with Windows 7, SP1 maybe, and these are still v1……anyway. I was pretty sure the Get-AppLockerPolicy cmdlet is going to be the one I want, so I can see exactly what rules are being applied. So, I did the obvious thing right? wink wink. I ran Get-Help and checked out the Syntax”:

Get-Help -Name Get-AppLockerPolicy

SYNTAX
    Get-AppLockerPolicy -Local [-Xml] [<CommonParameters>]

    Get-AppLockerPolicy -Domain -Ldap <string> [-Xml] [<CommonParameters>]

    Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective [-Xml] [<CommonParameters>]

Ok, so it looks like you can either get the Domain or Local policy, or the Effective policy, which would be the combination of both I would guess. So lets do that and see what is actually being applied.

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective

RunspaceId          : a3c075e3-c5c8-4120-8f37-b69d9deb38af
Version             : 1
RuleCollections     : {Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule, ,
                      Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule
                      Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule
                      Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule
                      Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule
                      Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FileHashRule…}
RuleCollectionTypes : {Appx, Dll, Exe, Msi…}

So wow, thats great info there, looks like all the conditions are in the RuleCollections property, lets dig in and see what info is in there.

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty RuleCollections | 
    Select-Object -First 1 -Property *

Capacity       : 4
Count          : 1
IsFixedSize    : False
IsReadOnly     : False
IsSynchronized : False
SyncRoot       : {Microsoft.Security.ApplicationId.PolicyManagement.PolicyModel.FilePublisherRule}

So, nothing, like literally nothing…am I missing something? Maybe in SyncRoot?

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty RuleCollections | 
    Select-Object -First 1 -ExpandProperty SyncRoot | 
    Select-Object -Property *

Length
------
    79

Length 79? So all this is doing is just giving me a string? And the value of that string is just the object type name? Like WTF is going on? So then I tried diving into that other property, the RuleCollectionTypes maybe? Seems like a long shot for sure:

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty RuleCollectionTypes

Appx
Dll
Exe
Msi

JFC! Where are the RULES! Insert Batman meme here…GIVE EM TO ME! I guess lets try that -Xml parameter, I mean, what other options are there…(see help output above, there are none):

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective -Xml

Not going to paste the out of that here, because its huge. But its not even true Xml, its just a string that has all the Xml tags, so you still have to cast it to Xml yourself:

[Xml](Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective -Xml)

AppLockerPolicy
---------------
AppLockerPolicy

Hey, look at that, an actual true Xml object that can be manipulated like any other Xml document. So, from what I can tell, the only real option you have here is to just spit out the Xml string to your clipboard and then paste it in a text editor and the use the find function to look for any rule or condition you maybe after. If you are just trying to be quick anyway. But that still seems like the worst solution ever! So, I decided to make a PowerShell function that would parse the Xml for you into usable, and more importantly, readable objects. This also gave me an excuse to spend some time in the IDE, which I jumped on, as I don’t get to do that near as much as I used to.

So, the TLDR: I created a cmdlet called ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml. This will take in Xml generated from Get-AppLockerPolicy and convert it to usable objects. It also does a few other things under the hood, such as converting the UserOrGroupSid property to the corresponding user or group name, it also bundles all the Conditions and Exceptions into a single properties:

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective -Xml | 
    ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml

Id              : bef5d95f-da42-4e68-b3bc-06f9e683891f
Name            : All My Stuff
Description     :
Type            : Exe
EnforcementMode : AuditOnly
UserOrGroup     : domain\tomohulk
Action          : Allow
Conditions      : {FilePathCondition}
Exceptions      :

And you can dive into the Conditions if you want or need to:

Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective -Xml | 
    ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml | 
    Select-Object -First 1 -ExpandProperty Conditions

ConditionType: FilePathCondition
Path: %OSDRIVE%\AllMyStuff\*

Mind you these are broad and very fake outputs here, but I think you get the idea. I did use PowerShell Classes to make it easy to cast to custom objects, in my case, hundreds of rule objects. So you need at least PowerShell 5.1. I Did all my development and testing for this in pwsh v7.1.2. And one other bonus from classes is I like that my custom (casted really) objects have valid descriptive type names:

(Get-AppLockerPolicy -Effective -Xml | 
    ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml)[0].GetType()

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
True     False    AppLockerRule                            System.Object

And when I say casting I mean it. There really isn’t much logic to this. It just iterates and then passes in the Xml nodes to the AppLockerRule class, and lets the class definition do all the heavy lifting and format the output. Here is the only executing code really ($Xml being the Xml string from Get-AppLockerPolicy -Xml):

foreach ($fileType in @("Appx", "Dll", "Exe", "Msi", "Script")) {
    $rules = $Xml.AppLockerPolicy.SelectNodes("//RuleCollection[@Type='$fileType']")
    foreach ($ruleType in @("FilePublisherRule", "FilePathRule", "FileHashRule")) {
        foreach ($rule in @($rules.$ruleType)) {
            [AppLockerRule]::new($rules.EnforcementMode, $rules.Type, $rule)
        }
    }
}

Cheers, and enjoy!

Motorizing Your Grain Mill

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you are like me, and most others I know who crush their own grain, you set up is pretty simple, a mill, and either you are hand cranking it, which sounds terrible, or you hooking your drill to it, and powering it that way. I personally am the latter, I hook my battery powered DeWalt drill to the mill and try to hold the speed slow and steady. This is a PITA for two reasons. First, I can never hold the speed the same for the entire crush, especially if its a rather large grain bill, and, this may not be true, but I feel like it cannot be great for my drill to run it with the trigger barely pressed for 15 minutes. And second, I cannot multitask when im grinding. I have to just sit there and hold the drill with one hand and add additional grains to the hopper with the other. I feel like its just a huge waste of time. I have seen setups where people mount a drill and set the speed buy using a zip tie to get the trigger just right. This wasn’t going to work for me because I don’t have a spare drill laying around I can donate to something like this, as it would have no other use. And if I’m going to buy a drill for this purpose, then I might as well just buy a motor to power this thing. And thats what I did.

Parts list

During my experimentation of this project I went through 3 different power supply units before settling on this one. I mean it needed to be 12v DC so that part was obvious, but I started with a 7A, the motor wouldn’t even turn on, then went to a 10A. This one worked, however, if it got even slightly jambed up, it would stop, and I would have to clear out the entire hopper to get it going again. It was terrible, especially as I wanted to do this build so I could fill the hopper and let it grind and go do other things, not babysit the grinder. After upgrading to the 20A its a beast and it has not jambed up on me not once.

Wire it up

This build is extremely easy, you run in the AC wire to the +/- and ground. Then the motor has red and black wires, its DC, so red goes to V+ and black goes goes to V-. Now, if you read any of my other blergs, I had an extra AC Rocker switch laying around from my BrewPiLess build, so I added that to my build to make it easy to turn the grinder on and off (you can find a wiring diagram on that post, just put it on the AC input in front of the PSU).

Thats pretty much it, I have this mounted up in my brew table, as you can see in the video, I secured it down with a U-bolt. Let me know if you have any questions, but this is a pretty straight forward build out, and saves me a lot of time, and I didn’t have to sacrifice a drill.

Thats it! Pour one for me, cheers!

Nobody Got Time For That

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have been tinkering with NEIPAs for a while now, in theory, they shouldn’t be too hard to make, and to get an OK one, they really aren’t. But I wanted something better then just OK. After about 10 attempts and lots of trial and error and even more picking the brains of the Homebrewing Slack team (Bender, if you’re reading this, this is your shout out), I think I have finally done it, I mean just absolutely nailed it! I personally think it all really came down to the water, but also, the now more readily available Kveik yeasts out there helped me as well. Especially Omega Voss, allowing to ferment at 90F+ you can turn beers around in 5-7 days. And they are some of the best NEIPAs I’ve ever had, second to maybe Arvon Brewing. Anyway, I wanted to share my findings and what seems to really be working for me. The best part is that the grain and water pretty much always stay the same, and you can just tinker with hops.

Water

OK, so first and foremost, the water. In all my experimentation with these HaziBois, I have found that water seems to play the most important roll in what makes the hops POP. Here is my water chemistry (the report is about a year old, I am due to have it updated again):

Ca: 41
Mg: 12
Na: 10
Cl: 16
SO4: 32
HCO3: 135
pH: 7.6

I have heard lots of people talk about Sulfate to Chloride ratios and flaked adjuncts to produce this slick, soft, or pillowy mouthfeel that is pinnacle to a NEIPA. After my experimenting, and trial and error, the best NEIPAs I am making I am going for a 1:1:1 ration of SO4:Cl:Ca, and I would ideally like to have them all at a 150ppm range, but, without cutting my water, I cannot get the numbers that high without getting my Mg and Na too high for my comfort range. But, I am able to get them all to 135ppm and that seems to work just fine, so that what I have been using

Target NEIPA Water Profile:

Ca: 150
Mg: 0
Na: 0
Cl: 150
SO4: 150
HCO3: 0
pH: 5.4

Actual NEIPA Water Profile After Treatment:

Ca: 136
Mg: 20
Na: 10
Cl: 134
SO4: 135
HCO3: 135
pH: 5.4 (takes me about 4.5mL of lactic)

I know I should probably cut my water with RO and get that hardness down, but to be honest, these batches are turning out so well, I don’t really feel the need to. And thats just one more thing I would need to prep, the best part of this beer is that it is a short brew day, less steps and a super fast ferment.

Mash

Grain bill:

80% base malt, I personally use Rahr 2-row, I bet a Pilsen would be great too!
20% White Wheat, I use Briess.
1.33lb/qt grist (this is just a personal preference i use this number for everything).

Only other thing I really have to say about this is, mash high, like a stout. I have been mashing at 156-157 for 45 minutes. Leaving some residual sugar post ferment to help with mouthfeel and softness. It seems to be working very well. And to be frank, Voss Kveik is a madman, if you mash at 152, its going to finish sub 1.010, and be too dry for a NEIPA.

Boil

F*** the boil, Nobody Got Time For That. Just bring the wort up to boil and insert your immersion chiller and start your whirlpool pump, and kill the flame. I do this to sanitize everything.

Whirlpool

So after killing the flame, I turn on my chiller for about 1-2 minutes, this will bring the wort to 190ish. Even after killing the flame, the temperature still seems to drop pretty quick to about 182ish. Time to hop the piss out this thing. I have been doing a half pound whirlpool only hop. I use 4oz Citra, 2oz Mosiac, and 2oz tuttie fruity hop of your choice, I have done Amarillo, and El Dorado, and at the time of this writing, a batch with Azzaca is in the fermenter. The El Dorado was amazing, one of the best NEIPAs I have ever had.

Now, I feel like my brew house is a bit prone to clogs during a heavy whirlpool, so I generally do it slowly. I add the Citra over about a minute, then Mosaic, then whatever I’m, using for the last happy hop. After this the temp is usually about 179. I start my timer for a 20 minute whirlpool and turn on a very low flame, with my banjo burner I can hold a temp to a degree or two, so I do my best to hold at 180F. Usually by the time the 20 minutes has passed, its at 181-182.

After the whirlpool, chill to 100F, rack to fermenter.

Ferment

Heres the good stuff, Voss is Boss set your temperature controller 90, And let it roll, you could probably go hotter if you wanted, I’ve heard of people pushing Voss over the 100F mark. I also DO NOT make a starter for a 5 gallon batch with this yeast, trying to stress it a bit for some esters.

Dry Hop

I do everything in 24 hour increments. 24 hours after pitch, I do a dry hop, 2oz Citra, 1oz, Mosaic, 1oz same hop I used to finish the whirlpool. 48 hours post pitch, hit with that hop dosage again, totalling one pound of hops. By 48 hours, the primary ferment will have already completed (again Voss is Boss). Let it sit for at least another 24 hours for hop utilization, but ideally I target 48 hours. So a four day total ferment. Next is up to you, cold crash. Your call. I usually do it for 24 hours just to let some hops fall out of solution, so I don’t get clogged dip tubes in my kegs. But this is not a mandatory step.

Drink Up

Last thing is to package and serve, do what you do here, nothing special. I close transfer and try to carbonate and serve as soon as possible. Fresher is better!

Thats it, cheers!

Replace Failed Storage Pool HDD

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In my day to day jobby, I manage multiple Hyper-V clusters, and these clusters use shared storage. Most of the storage is a JBOD shelf with dual SAS connections to the hypervisor nodes. Because the shelf is JBOD, Windows is the brains for the storage. Enter Windows Storage Spaces. This is basically a Software RAID that you configure a pool of disks, and then you layer a VHD over that pool. After a volume is created on the VHD, it can be used by the hosts. These volumes can be added to Cluster Shared Volumes which allows the volume to move between host nodes, creating redundancy. All the VMs hosted in the cluster, live on the CSV, making them Highly Available.

As hardware always does, physical disks in the pool fail. Most of the Microsoft docs on fixing this issue are quite cumbersome to follow, and even more so, they tend to deal with Storage Spaces Direct, which is not the same technology. So I thought I would make up a quick little walk through on replacing a failed HDD in a storage pool. I have to do this about once a month, so this is just as much for me, as it is for you.

In my configuration, I run Windows Server Core exclusively for Hypervisors, so we will tackling this with PowerShell, tbh, not really even sure how to do this with a GUI.

Identifying a failed HDD

Identifying a failed HDD is pretty simple, it can be done with a simple PowerShell command:

Get-PhysicalDisk | ? HealthStatus -ne "Healthy"

This will show you any disks that have failed, I typically use a 3-way mirror on my Storage Pools, so if that number is greater then 2, then well, might as well just start over. Anyway, if the Usage property of the failed disk is not marked as Retired, you will need to mark it as such:

Get-PhysicalDisk | ? HealthStatus -ne "Healthy" | Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired

So, this next part tends to vary between JBOD models, but to actually identify the failed HDD for physical replacement, there are a few things you can do, first off, you can actually trigger the slots LED to indicate the failed drive:

# This command assumes you already completed the previous command and 'Retired' the failed disks.
Get-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired | Enable-PhysicalDiskIdentification

You can also get the physical SlotNumber:

Get-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired | select SlotNumber

However, this number is 0 indexed so when looking at the JBOD shelf, be sure to start counting at 0.

Replacing the HDD

After you have identified the failed HDD and marked it as retired, you can now physically replace the drive. In my experience, after the new drive is inserted and running Get-PhysicalDisk the new drive always hangs in a Starting Operational Status. And because of this you cannot add it to the storage pool (notice the CanPool Property will be False). This can be cleared up by Resetting the disk:

Get-PhysicalDisk | ? OperationalStatus -eq "Starting" | Reset-PhysicalDisk

After this is complete, running the Get-PhysicalDisk will show the disk is Healthy and the CanPool property will be True. Now, you need to identify the Storage Pool’s Friendly Name, this can be found by running the Get-StoragePool command. Once you have the Friendly Name, you can add the new disk to the pool:

Add-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName MyStoragePool -PhysicalDisks ( Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool:$true )

Now that the drive is replaced, go ahead and repair the virtual disk:

Get-VirtualDisk | ? HealthStatus -ne "Healthy" | Repair-VirtualDisk

This will take some time depending on how large the virtual disk is, resiliency settings, and hardware, but there will be a progress bar. Or you can add the -AsJob switch to the Repair-VirtualDisk command and let it run in the background. You can fetch the status with Get-StorageJob.

Be sure to disable the LED identification:

# I always just run this on against all the disks, it won't hurt anything for the ones where its not enabled.
Get-PhysicalDisk | Disable-PhysicalDiskIdentification

After the repair is complete, the last step is to remove the failed drive from the pool. Remember, the repair has to fully complete before removing the failed drive from the pool, else data loss will occur.

Remove-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName MyStoragePool -PhysicalDisks ( Get-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired )

And thats it, good to go! Cheers.

Installing PKI SSL Certificate on HPE iLO

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I work with HPE Systems almost exclusively, and as of late I have been getting very irritated with the browser warning about the self signed SSL cert that is installed on the HPE iLO by default.

You have to jump through a few clicky hoops and the browser remembers none of it the next time you visit the page. So, the real solution for this, and probably something that should be done anyway, is to install a certificate issued by a corporate certificate authority. The process for doing this isn’t very difficult, its more just cumbersome and, with HPE iLOs, its quite time consuming as well. Anyway, I put together a script to make this much easier, I put it together fairly quickly as well, so I’m sure that there are things could be improved, but the concept is solid.

Manual steps

I suppose before we jump into the automation portion, as with anything that is being automated, its best we cover the manual steps for reaching our goal so we fully understand what needs to be done, and what information is needed to get it done.

After signing into the iLO, in the Administration section in the Security workspace, there is an SSL Certificate tab. On that tab you select the Customize Certificate button, and from there you will get a dialog, asking for the basic information to build the Certificate Signing Request.

Required values:

Country
State or Province
Locality or City
Organization
Common Name (this can be the FQDN or the short name, despite what the warning says, the short name works too.)

Optional values:

Organizational Unit or Department
Include the iLO IP Address in the CSR

After filling these in, hit the Generate Request button. Now this part is really dumb, the CSR is generating, but it takes a random amount of time (0-10 minutes), with no progress control. You just keep hitting the Generate Request again and again until the dialog pops up

The iLO subsystem is currently generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This may take 10 minutes or more. In order to view the CSR, wait 10 minutes or more, and then click the “Generate CSR” button again.

Once the dialog opens, you will need to copy the entire CSR output, including the -----Begin/End Certificate Request----- portions.

After you have the CSR, browse out to your CA and generate an Advanced Certificate Request, paste in the CSR, select your desired template, and submit the request. (I’m not going into info on CAs and templates in this walk through, I’m sure either you know how to do this, else ask your PKI admin). On the certificate download page, select the BASE64 encoding, and download the certificate, you do not the entire chain. Lastly, on the same screen in the iLO, you select the Import Certificate button, and in the dialog, you will paste your cert data. You get this by right clicking the certificate file you generated and downloaded, and select Open With -> Notepad and there you will get a similar result as the CSR, but a longer string of random characters, that is what you paste in the iLO dialog. If this was all done correctly the iLO will reset, and you will have a custom certificate installed. And no more security warning if you browse to it by the name you entered into the Common Name property.

Whew! Lets automate this.

As you can see, there really isn’t that many steps, but I have hundreds of HPE servers, and there is no way in Hell I am going to sign into each one, generate a CSR, wait, wait, wait, then go to my CA, submit the request, save it, open it, and paste it in the web page hundreds of times. So I started messing with the HPEiLOCmdlets PowerShell Module, and using those its pretty easy to start the CSR generation, and once its created, use certreq.exe to submit the request, and the HPEiLOCmdlets can be used to install the certificate as well.

Breaking Down The Code

The cmdlet I created is called New-HPEiLOPKICertificate Here is the usage:

New-HPEiLOPKICertificate.ps1 [-Credential] <pscredential> [-iLOName] <string[]> [[-Country] <string>] [[-State] <string>] [[-Locality] <string>] [[-Organization] <string>] [[-OrganizationalUnit] <string>] [[-CertificateAuthorityName] <string>] [[-CertificateTemplateName] <string>] [[-FirmwareMinimumVersion] <version>] [-IncludeiLOIP] [<CommonParameters>]

The parameters pretty much all line up with the values discribed above, with the exception of a few:

Credential - This is a PSCredential object for the iLO login credentials, use Get-Credential to populate this value.
iLOName - This is the CommonName can be the FQDN or the shortname.
CertificateAuthorityName - This is your CA instance, you can find this by just typing certreq in CMD.
CertificateTemplateName - The template to submit your CSR against.
FirmwareMinimumVersion - The HPEiLOCmdlets seem to only like newer iLO versions, I can tell you 2.55 does not work, but 2.70 does.

If you want you can set default parameter values in the script, so your really only have to change the iLOName.

New-HPEiLOPKICertifacte.ps1 -iLOName myHPEiLO.tomohulk.io -Credential ( Get-Credential )

The workflow of the cmdlet is pretty straight forward:

Connect to the iLO.
Verify the firmware version is a minimum version.
Begin the CSR generation with the supplied values.
Looping every 5 seconds, query the iLO to see if the CSR has been generated.
Export the CSR to a temp file.
Submit the request to the the CA using certreq.exe.
Use resulting .pem file to upload the new certificate to the iLO.
Delete the temporary .csr and .pem files.

This cmdlet accepts pipeline input for the iLOName as well as a StringArray, so as long as they have the same credentials, you can complete this on multiple systems at once:

@("ilo1", "ilo2") | New-HPEiLOPKICertificate -Credential ( Get-Credential )

# or

New-HPEiLOCertificate -iLOName "ilo1", "ilo2" -Credential ( Get-Credential )

Thats pretty much it, after the iLO resets and you refresh the page, you will see your connection is now secure.

Here is the complete code, cheers!:

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have been 3D printing for about a year now, its had its ups and downs, good times and bad. Some times its the greatest thing, and sometimes I’m glad I don’t keep a baseball bat near my 3D Printer, because I may not still be the owner of one if I did. I know all printers are different and everyone has their reasons for why or what they do and use for the build surface. I have the Ender3, its a great entry level printer for the price and I have spit out some amazing prints. But one the most notorious issues with the Ender3 is the warped bed. It seems like everyone has reported this issue. And I think one thing all 3D Printer Hobbyist could agree on, is the first layer is one of the most important parts of the print. And when you printing around .2mm layer hight, if the build surface isn’t perfect you’re going to have problems, especially with larger prints.

There are a few things you could do about this, such as, just deal with it, replace the bed with something higher grade, or add a new surface, such as a piece of glass. I chose to use a sensor on the hot end. I went with the BLTouch sensor. It’s pretty much just a probe, that will make a mesh of your build surface and allow for your Z axis to compensate for the imperfect surface with very small up and down Z axis movements.

Now, I know there is a lot of YouTube videos out there on how to setup and use a BLTouch sensor, but, everything I found when I was setting mine up, was with using the Marlin firmware. Either Vanilla Marlin or the TH3D flavor. Well, to complicate things even more, I am using Klipper. I’m not going to dive into much about Klipper in this blog post, as its not really the focus. Either you are already using Klipper and you know what it is, so keep reading, or go research Klipper and see if its for you. Because these settings will NOT work with any flavor of the Marlin firmware.

Values You’ll Need

There are values you need when setting up your BLTouch, namely the X and Y offsets from the nozzle to the BLTouch, you can either measure these or, if you are using third party mods on your hot end, a lot of the designers will specify these values. I am using the Bullseye Cooling Fan Duct and the designer has provided the offset values on the Thingiverse page. Using the Bullseye Fan Duct and the provided mount, the offsets are X -42, Y -5.

Next, you will need to know your bed size, the bed that ships with the Ender3 is 220x220mm. You need to know this for creating a bed mesh, which is what the BLTouch will build when probing.

Get Configuring

Here are the settings you need to add or update on in your Klipper printer.cfg:

You need to change the endstop_pin value to use a virtual endstop, this is in the z_stepper section.
- endstop_pin: probe:z_virtual_endstop
You need to allow the Z Axis to go below the ‘0’ mark for negative warp, this can be done by editing the position_min value, also in the z_stepper section.
- position_min: -3
You need to define the [bltouch] section and values in the configuration file (a section is defined with square brackets, this section does not exist in the Ender3 printer.cfg by default, so you will need manually create it). You can see that the X and Y offsets are the values I got from the Thingiverse page.
```
[bltouch]
sensor_pin: ^PC4
control_pin: PA4
x_offset: -47.0
y_offset: -5.0
z_offset: 1.65
speed: 5.0
samples: 2
sample_retract_dist: 8.0
```
- The samples value is how many times it checks each location in the bed mesh, more samples will take longer.
Next, the [bed_mesh] section needs to be manually defined.
```
[bed_mesh]
speed: 80
horizontal_move_z: 5
min_point: 50,30
max_point: 230,230
probe_count: 5,5
```
- The probe_count is how many samples its going to take, 5,5 is a 5x5 grid, a bigger grid will take longer, but may be more accurate.
- The min_point and max_point is how big your bed is, with the 220x220mm build plate, 230x230mm is about as large as you can go.
Now, add the [homing_override] section. You can do what ever you want here, I am just setting the Z axis to home in the middle of the bed.
```
[homing_override]
set_position_z:0
gcode:
 G1 Z10 F600
 G28 X Y
 G1 X166 Y120 F6000
 G28 Z
```
- PRO TIP: gcode sections in the printer.cfg need to be 4 spaced or you will get errors.
There is one last thing to do, and that is configure your start and end gcode sequences to tell klipper to generate the bed mesh and use it. This command is BED_MESH_CALIBRATE called after G28 (the homing override). Now, here is what I do, I keep my start and end gcode sequences in the Klipper printer.cfg as gcode_macros. This allows me to use multiple slicers and keep my start and end gcode the same. I have them mapped to START_PRINT and END_PRINT, then in any slicer i am using, I can just put those in and let Klipper handle the sequences. I have included my printer.cfg at the bottom of this page so you take a look at my start up and end print gcode.

Configure The Z Offset

So, for me this was the hardest part, I had the probe working, and at least stopping from crashing into the bed, but, I couldn’t figure out how to actually make the printer know the space from the probe being triggered, to the bottom of the nozzle. Which is obviously crucial for the hotend to know how much lower to go past the point where the BLTouch is triggered and be the perfect height above the bed to start printing. Well, its actually really simple. At least thats how I feel about it now that I know how to do it. And after figuring it out, the only time I have had to re-calibrate my Z offset is when I replace the nozzle.

Go into your printer.cfg and change the z_offset to 10 in the [bltouch] section. This number is completely arbitrary. Just need a value there, and one that will be easy to do math with later.
Home the printer, G28. as long as your [bltouch] settings are correct, the BLTouch pin should engage, and the Z axis should lower and stop, once its triggered. I kept my finger on the power button at this point to stop the hotend from crashing into the bed if need be.
Next tell the printer to go into Relative Position mode: G91
Now move the hotend over the spot the BLTouch probed to home the bed: G1 X-47
Get a piece of paper and get ready to bed level like you always do, lower the Z axis by -.05 until the nozzle scrapes the paper. You can do this with the display control, or I use OctoPod on my iOS device.
Once the Z axis is where it needs to be, you can run GET_POSITION in the terminal and then just do the math:
- [printer.cfg [bltouch] z_offset] - [z value from GET_POSITION] = z_offset
- IE: 10 - 8.5 = 1.5
Replace your the z_offset value in the [bltouch] section with your new calculated value.
Print and be happy as your first layer runs perfect!

I actually left my printer off for about 4 weeks recently, turned it on and fired off a print, first layer still layed perfect. Cheers!

Update

20190609 - A recent Klipper update moved the samples: 2 and sample_retract_distance: 8.0 from the [bed_mesh] section to the [bltouch] section. I have updated this article to reflect those changes.

My Ender3 Klipper printer.cfg

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure out there who needs to hear this, but clean your beer lines! After a while of beer sitting, lines begin to stain and leave flavors that will be picked up by other beers. I mean who wants to have a lingering coffee porter in your NEIPA? No one, thats who. There is no one size fits all for how often you should clean your lines, it depends a lot on things like how long the beer has been siting in them, how often are they used, and what style of beer. In the past, I would just replace the lines every 6 months. There is a few things wrong with doing this, first of all, its costly, second of all, its a pain in that ass, and third, six months between cleaning/replacing is too long IMO. Now I am rinsing lines every other month. Maybe that is too often, but after you see how easy it is to do, I could do it even more often and not really mind.

Build It

So, the most important part of this build, is the pump. The good news is, if you built a keg washer based on my last post (CIP DIY Keg Washer), then you already have a pump that will work perfect for this. That pump has the power to push cleaner through 4 taps, each with 10’ of beverage line. If you have more then 4 taps, either you’ll have to do it in sections, or you may need a more powerful pump.

Here is the basic premise of this line cleaner, you are going to pump cleaner INTO tap #1, then connect that line to the tap line next to it, so the cleaner will be coming OUT tap #2. Then you connect tap #2 to tap #3, and again, connect tap #3 and tap #4 lines together, and this will cause the cleaner to come out tap #4, and back into the the bucket that the pump is in, allowing for the cleaner to be continuously recirculated through all taps and lines.

TLDR Connect everything together in a way allowing for cleaner to be pumped into tap #1 and come out tap #4.

A key component of this will be hooking beverage line to beverage line. Which means you need a custom fitting allowing for disconnect to connect to disconnect. If you have old kegs lying around, I guess you could steal pieces from that. You could buy posts, but that would way more expensive then just replacing the lines regularly. Im sure you already know what I did…of course, I designed something that could be 3D printed (Thingiverse link).

I’m actually pretty proud of this design, it was pretty in depth to make, and I got to learn some really interesting things with Fustion360 (something similar, not designed by me, but the same concept for ball locks can be found here). I printed two of these, allowing me to connect pin lock to pin lock disconnects together.

I had to get some rubber O-rings for them, #10 faucet O-rings from my local hardware store. I don’t normally discuss print settings for things because there is so many variables, but one thing I will say, is print these at 100% infill as pressurized liquid will be flowing through them. Or, if you don’t want to go the route of connecting beer lines together via the disconnects, if the barbs on your disconnects are removable, the you could remove the disconnect and use a pressure fitting to connect them. I like the way I have it, because its also cleaning the disconnects this way.

Outside of those two major things, the only other parts you need is a barb to go in place of your CIP Ball on your keg washer (see previous post), some hose or tubing, I just use the same silicone tube I use when kegging, and some actual BLC (Beer Line Cleaner).

Use It

After you have all together, the rest is easy, mix up enough BLC in a bucket to submerge your pump, run your pump into tap #1, connect tap #1 line to tap #2 line, connect tap #2 to tap #3, I just used a small piece of silicone tube for this, then connect tap #3 line to tap #4 line. BE SURE TO OPEN ALL YOUR TAPS! Turn the pump on and let the liquid flow though your keezers veins, and come out tap #4. Now, my taps are close enough together I can do this with a five gallon bucket, but you may have to get creative if thats not the case for you.

Thats pretty much it, let that recirculate for 15-20 minutes. Empty the bucket and fill with hot clean water, and rinse for 10 minutes. I usually rinse for 5 minutes, empty the bucket, fill again with hot clean water, and rinse another 5.

Thats it. And I’m sure the patrons of your homemade beer will have much praise to give on how fresh and clean your homebrew has become. Cheers!

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ok Ok, its time for an easy build, no software, no programing, no CLI (command line interface) this one is cake, you don’t even need any tools, just some time (and money), and it will make washing your kegs easy peasy. And, in a later post, I’ll show you how to easily turn this washer into a keezer beer line cleaner!

So, frankly, F washing kegs! I mean if you are going to do it right you need to disassemble, remove the dip tube, wash, wash, rinse, rinse, blah blah. Ain’t no one got time for that! I’ve got a nice little build here that doesn’t break the bank and works pretty damn well. lets get to it!

Ok, down to business, this really doesn’t even need a build walk through but, I’m gonna give a little one, because……the pump works great to clean your beer lines as well (post to come) so I hope you buy one. This list going to be a little lack luster, because I bought some of it at my local hardware. But the few things you can get online are:

Submersible Pump
CIP Spray Ball
Liquid Keg Disconnect (I use pin lock)
Some hose or tube im sure you have laying around, only need like 6”. Size is variable as the pump comes with multiple barbs.
A bucket.
I used under ground sprinkler 1/2” NPT PVC (this is what I got at my locale hardware).

So, this build is pretty flipping easy. Basically, you just need a PVC tube up from the pump outlet, with the CIP Ball on top, now I added a T at the bottom, used a 6” tube, a T, and a 16” tube, and used a barb that comes with the pump and a short piece of hose to the liquid disconnect to shoot cleaner/rinse up the dip tube as well. Then the concept is straight forward, just fill a bucket with some water and oxyclean, put your keg cleaner in there and shoot hot oxyclean through the keg for a while and then switch it with clean hot water and rinse!

Boom, a keg cleaner. For me, I use old 7.75gal kegs as fermenters, so I use this to clean them as well. Works really good.

cake! easy peasy build! BEER TIME!

Sources

https://beer.thegremlyn.com/2017/03/15/i-built-a-keg-washer-you-should-too/

PiLess BrewPi

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Its no secret that temperature control is a huge aspect of brewing beer successfully. It can have dramatic side effects if you don’t keep the temperature in the yeasts range, or you may not be able to achieve flavors that you’re seeking from the yeast fermenting at a specific temperature. Now, in my past life as @dotps1, I covered in detail how to make a BrewPi. A temperature controller running with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino board (that blog post can be found here, for now anyway, I’m not sure how long I will be keeping https://dotps1.github.io up). The BrewPi is defiantly a solid temperature controller solution, that allows for many customization, and the ability to create temperature profiles, allowing for temperature ramp up and cold crashing. And most importantly, it handles temperature swing. Unfortunately, the BrewPi is no longer officially supported on the Raspberry Pi/Arduino configuration, and as you can see the branch hasn’t been touched in years, https://github.com/BrewPi/brewpi-www/tree/legacy. I made this clear in my last walk through, which is over a year old now, and I had to fork the project and fix a bunch of dependency issues, that probably are already out of date.

Enter the PiLess BrewPi

So, theres another implementation of the BrewPi software out there, called BrewPiLess. And the best part is, it doesn’t need a Raspberry Pi, or even an Arduino Controller! And the project is actively developed, which means new features, and bug fixes. One of the really great features the BrewPiLess has, is that it supports logging data to BrewFather. There you can attach the device to a batch, and keep track of the temperature as the batch is fermenting, and all the data is stored in one place.

I was able to get this up and running, oh, I’d say about 10x faster then I got the BrewPi up. However, if you read my last blog on makeing a BrewPi, I housed everything in an outdoor sprinkler control box, it was huge and there where power cords and temperature probes hanging all over the place. Well this time, I wanted something fully modular, where all the cords where removable, and much much smaller. As small as absolutely possible. I reached my goal, but if you want your BPL exactly the same as mine, you will need to solder some connections in this build, and have access to a 3D Printer for the enclosure. These are not show stoppers, there is plenty of other ways to put everything together, this is just my way based on the things I regretted doing when I built my BrewPi, and features I wanted in this build.

Shopping List

Most of this stuff comes in bulk, so find a buddy that wants one too, and split the cost!

ESP8266 NodeMCU (you don’t need two of these, but at that price, might as well, the second one is almost free)
Two Channel Relay Module
20x4 LCD Module (this is optional if you would like a display on the controller)
AC->DC 5V PSU (this acts a power supply unit inside the enclosure, powering all the componets, else you can power things with USB bricks, but that sounds like a mess)
Mini XLR Male connectors (2 needed) (these are optional allowing for the temperature probes to be disconnected from the enclosure)
Mini XLR Female connectors (2 needed) (these are optional allowing for the temperature probes to be disconnected from the enclosure)
AC 3-Pin Outlets (2 needed)
3-Position Screw Terminal
AC Rocker Switch
DS18B20 Temperature Probes (2 needed)
4.7k Resistor (only 1 is needed, but good luck finding just 1 for sale)
Breadboard Jumpers (really only need female jumpers for this project)
Misc screws, wire, shrink tube, and wire nuts/connectors

Pro Tip

I am going to suggest starting this project by printing the enclosure. I am going to suggest this for a few reasons, first of all, most the customization I used in my build are only really needed if you are going to use my enclosure design. Things like the plugs, XLR connections, AC Rocker Switch and the LCD are all going to work perfect in my enclosure, Second, it takes a bit to print, and well, everything mounts in the enclosure, so you’re going to kinda need that part right away. If you’re not going to use my design, you can probably skip this part, and just mock everything up so you can figure out how your going to house this contraption.

The enclosure I designed is available on Thingiverse. It is one of the first things I’ve designed, so I’m sure there are things that could be done better but it works well enough for what it is. I’m not going to go into print settings for this as its out of the scope of this walk through. So, if you’re going this route, download the stl and get it printing because it will take a bit, you can print the lid while you are assembling the rest of the BPL.

Time to make the chimi-f***ing-changas

So, the first thing I want to say about this system, is that its dealing with 110v AC power, you will be running that power to the AC->DC converter (the NodeMCU and LCD run on DC power), and to the relay module, which essentially turns on/off your power outlets, which will control your Heating and Cooling in your fermentation chamber. I cannot over stress this enough, IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WORKING WITH ELECTRICITY OR DON’T KNOW HOW BASIC ELECTRICAL WIRING WORKS, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING, PUT YOUR TOOLS DOWN, AND FIND SOMEONE WHO DOES! Ok, with that being said, lets get down to business.

Install the BrewPiLess bin on the ESP8266 NodeMCU

Download the BrewPiLess Repository:
- git clone https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess.git
If you don’t have it installed, you will need to download and install VSCode.
Open the repository in VSCode. If you don’t have Platform.io installed, go to the extensions workspace and install it.
- On my mac, it failed to install the first, and it was because virtualenv needed to be installed. Completing the three steps listed in the Perquisites section here, and then uninstall/reinstall the extension fixed the issue.
Connect the NodeMCU to your computer via USB, and flash the bin to the board (make sure you are in the working directory of the repo):
- command+shit+p
  - >PlatformIO: Build
  - >PlatformIO: Upload
  - >PlatformIO: Clean
After the flash is complete, the NodeMCU will begin broadcasting its own SSID, you need to connect to to this WiFi network to configure it to connect to your home WiFi.
- Username: brewpiless
- Password: brewpiless
- Open a browser it should auto connect to a config page, where you can change the username, password, and the title.
- Save the changes and on the next page enter you home wireless info.
- After this is complete you can connect back to your home wifi.

Soldering

There are a few things to solder, and some need to be done before assembly:

Solder your wires to the AC->DC 5V PSU, you won’t be able to do this after its in the enclosure.
- On the POWER IN side, you need 14-16 AWG wire, basically the same wire thats in the walls of your house, I clipped an old Molex computer cable and stole wire from that. This wire needs to be heavier gauge because it will have the 110v that is coming from your house to it, then will convert that to 5v DC.
- On the POWER OUT side, you need THREE Hot and Ground leads. These will power the NodeMCU, LCD and Relay. Just clip one end of the breadboard jumper wires for this.
- you can either solder the wire right to the board, or there is screw terminals that you could get as well, that you would solder to the board, and then you can screw the wires into the terminals, the choice is yours.
The temperature probes need to be soldered to the female XLR connectors, the wire to pin layout don’t matter really, just as long as you do both of them the same.
- Unscrew the connector, put the plastic housing over the temperature probe wire, and solder the three wires from the probe to the three pin cups on the connector.
- Repeat this step for the other temperature probe.
- One thing I did was cut one probe a bit shorter then the other, for two reasons. First, the probe to monitor the fridge temperature didn’t need to be 6’ long. Second, it makes it easier for me to keep track of which probe is for the chamber temperature and which is for the beer temperature.
While you have your solder gear out, might as well solder the wires to the male fittings as well.
- Sacrifice a few jumper wires for this, I would recommend using the same colors as the wires that where in the temperature probes so you can keep every thing lined up. The connectors are keyed so they can only go together one way.
- leave about 2-3 inches (cut a jumper in half) of wire, these will connect to the three position screw terminal that is directly behind the connectors in the enclosure (see the layout image below).
- Solder the wires to the pin cups, again, be sure your wire colors match up, your basically just making a pass thru connection in the enclosure, that is detachable if need be.

Assembly

Wiring diagram: Layout diagram (I wasn’t able to find a 3D model of the AC-DC 5V PSU, that goes in with the Power IN facing way from the the LCD in the big empty space):

At this point, you can start putting all the pieces in the enclosure.
- Place each board on its mounting posts, I used old computer motherboard screws to hold them down.
- The three position screw terminal I glued to the post.
Use the diagram above to connect all the jumpers.
- The power for the NodeMCU will be supplied from the AC->DC 5V PSU to the 5V pin on the board.
- Connect a ground lead from the AC->DC 5V PSU to any ground on the NodeMCU board.
- In the diagram it shows the 5V pin is used to power the relay module, but that is assuming the NodeMCU is being powered VIA the USB port. Which is not the case, the 5V (maybe also labeled ‘Vin’) pin on the board will be used to power the NodeMCU itself, and then you can use one of the 3 power leads from the AC->DC 5V PSU to power the relay module.
- Be sure to add the resistor in the three position screw terminal when wiring in the temperature probes.
Next wire in the power switch and the outlets.
- AC Rocker switch wiring digram:
- From the power switch you will have three leads, 1 to the AC->DC 5V PSU, and 1 for each outlet. I used lever action wire nuts for this connection because there is 4 14AWG wires connecting at this point.
- The Relay acts as a switch to complete the circuit, so the hot goes in, and the back out to outlet, and the naturel goes directly to the outlet.

There really isn’t much more I can say about the wiring of this, all the information needed is in the diagram, there is more then one way to skin a cat, so just make sure your wiring is following the diagram and you’ll be fine. One thing to note, my fridge that I have plugged in the cooling outlet must draw a lot of amps, because the power switch comes with a 5 amp fuse, and when it turned on it, blew that, I had to replace it with a 10 amp fuse.

BrewPiLess Configuration

Once everything is up an running, there isn’t much left to do. Just need to set which plug is the hot and cold, and which probes are the chamber, and the beer.

Connect to your BrewPiLess via a web browser at http://brewpiless.local (or whatever you named it in the setup screen.)
Go to the Device Setup screen on the top right corner.
- Be sure to click the Erase EEPROM button at the top to be sure everything is reset.
- Click Refresh Device List on the top load all your devices.
- You have to manually select a Device slot for each probe and plug, but these are arbitrary, they just have to be unique.
- The temperature probes will have an Address value.
- Setup 4 devices:
  - Chamber Temp
  - Beer Temp
  - Chamber Heater
  - Chamber Cooler
- I am not sure if there is a better way to then trial and error to identify which is which, for the probes you can just hold in your hand and the value will change on the display. For the plugs you will need to actually set a Beer or Fridge temperature value and then one or the other will turn on.
Once your get everything setup, I would recommend backing up the configuration from the Device Setup screen incase you ever need to reload or rebuild, then you won’t have to play the guessing game on which device is which.

Extra Credit

If your like me, you are going to want to change the temperature units from C to F, because the NodeMCU has such little amount of space, there is no room for webpages to handle customization. Instead, you do it with commands:

Navigate to http://brewpiless.local/testcmd.htm
Issue this command:
- j{"tempFormat":"F"}
If your getting in the Kveik craze, and want to ferment hot AF, the you need to increase the tempSetMax value:
- j{"tempSetMax":"90.0"}

There is plenty of customizing you can do, just check out the BrewPiLess wiki: https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess/wiki

Time for a Cold One

Whew, you did it! Nice work! Go pour yourself a cold one, I know I’m going too, sorry if I missed anything, this was a pretty intense walk through. Cheers!

Taplist Pi Zero

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So, if in your homebrew life, you’ve moved on past bottling (because its it f***ing terrible) and are kegging your ferments, you’ve probably already come up with some way to label or mark your taps so you know what tap is pouring what beverage. I know there is a lot of articles out there on this topic, but, I wanted to share my experience on the matter, and hopefully, it can save you some time, and money.

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit of a tech nerd, so obviously I wanted digital signage. I mean there is several options out there to do this manually. Tap handles with black board surfaces you can write on with chalk, or even black board spray paint, you could paint on your kegerator or keezer. Or maybe make some other type of labels that hang on the taps or whatever. But I didn’t want anything like that, I wanted an actual taplist. One of the main reasons this was even remotely cost feasible for me, is I had an extra 22” LCD monitor laying around. If you have to buy a monitor to pull this off, then this walk through probably isn’t for you, but if not here is a list of things you’ll need:

The first time I did this, I used a Raspberry Pi 3, which is probably over kill for hardware to make a taplist, especially when all we are going to do is display a web page. A few months ago, I need a Raspberry Pi for another project, and when I looked to buy one, they are like $30, however, at the time, I found a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 (at the time of this writing it is ~$15). It doesn’t have near the hardware resources, but again, we are just going to be displaying a webpage. (Also, with taplist.io, you can use a kindle fire stick, I haven’t ever set it up with that, but I do know that there instructions on the product page on how to set one up.) So, lets get started.

taplist.io

The premise of this digital taplist, uses a free product (for personal use) called Taplist.io. You will need to create an account, and from there, you can create taps, build your beverage database, create kegs, attach kegs to taps. I’m not going to go into very much detail on this part because there is so many variables, and so much customization you can do with it. what ever you customize under the “Look And Feel” section of your dashboard, is what will be displayed on the final product when you are finished. The other nice part is you get an online taplist you can share with anyone (you can find mine at the bottom of this page, by clicking the “beer mug” icon).

Setting up the Raspberry Pi Zero

For the first part of this build, we need to install and configure the Raspberry Pi Zero, we will be installing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch Lite.

Download the latest img for Raspbian Stretch Lite here.
Open the Disk Utility app:
- Press CMD+SPACE to open the Spotlight application.
- In the search bar type Disk Utility.
In the top left had corner, select View, and be sure Show All Devices is selected.
Next, you will need to be sure the SD card is formated with the FAT file system.
- Select the SD drive in the left pane.
- Select Erase from the top.
- Make sure you pick FAT (MS-DOS) for the file system, and MBR (Master Boot Record) for the partition.
- THIS WILL ERASE THE ENTIRE SD CARD, SO BE SURE YOU HAVE SAVED ANYTHING YOU WANT TO EVER SEE AGAIN!
Open a terminal using the Spotlight tool (see step 2) and type Terminal.
In the terminal application, find your disk number by running diskutil list
Note your disk number, it will be in the format of /dev/disk2, it may not actually be the number 2, just look at the size of the disk and make sure its the correct one.
Unmount the disk with diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2, again, replace 2 with number of your SD card.
write the image to the SD Card with dd:
- sudo dd bs=1m if=Downloads/raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk4 conv=sync
- Replace Downloads/raspbian-stretch-lite.img with the path to the .img file you downloaded in step 1.
- Again, replace rdisk4 with the disk number you found in step 7.
- This may take some time, took my system about 10 minutes on an 8GB SD Card with a Thunderbolt SD Card Reader.

Configuring Raspbian Lite Stretch

After the img is done writing to the SD card, its time to being configuring Raspbian. Because the Raspberry Pi Zero has such little hardware, we are going to try to keep this as minimal as possible.

SSH is disabled by default, so to enable it, you need to create an empty file called ssh:
- touch /Volumes/boot/ssh
Next, you need to append dtoverlay=dwc2 to the end of /Volumes/boot/config.txt. You can do this either with textEdit or with a terminal editor.
This next step is a little tricky, first open /Volumes/boot/cmdline.txt, and located the text rootwait, immediately after that, add a space, and then this text: modules-load=dwc2,g_ether. So it should look like this:
- rootwait modules-load=dwc2,g_ether
Now go ahead and eject the SD card and then load it into the Raspberry Pi Zero and plug in the power. It will take about 60 seconds to boot up, then connect it to your computer.
Next, go to System Preferences > Network and you will see a new device called RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget. This is the Raspberry Pi Zero, you can share your internet connection to it, which will then all you to SSH to the device.
Go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable internet sharing for the RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget.
You should now beable to ssh to the Raspberry Pi Zero:
- ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
- Default password is raspberry.
- Type yes to accept the certificate thumbprint.
After you are connected, there are a few things that need to be set, run raspi-config and update the following:
- CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD else anyone can now ssh to your taplist board with the default credentials!
- Under Boot Options select Desktop/CLI and then select Console Autologin.
- Lastly configure the wifi.
You are now connected to your wifi, and can update the system:
- sudo apt-get update -y
- sudo apt-get upgrade -y
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
Now, install the minimum X Server Environment for Chromium:
- sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg x11-xserver-utils xinit openbox
- sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends chromium-browser
You need to configure the auto start commands, and to do this, you will have to use a terminal based editor, like nano or vi. I prefer nano:
- sudo nano /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart

Replace the entire contents of the file with this:

# Disable any form of screen saver / screen blanking / power management
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms

# Allow quitting the X server with CTRL-ATL-Backspace
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

# Start Chromium in kiosk mode
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/' ~/.config/chromium/'Local State'
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/; s/"exit_type":"[^"]\+"/"exit_type":"Normal"/' ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences
chromium-browser --disable-infobars --kiosk 'https://www.taplist.io/display'

You need to configure X Server to autostart and boot and load the display web page.
- nano ~/.bash_profile
- Add this to the file: [[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && startx -- -nocursor
- Save and close the file.
Lastly shut you Raspberry Pi Zero down sudo shutdown now and go attach it to your monitor. You do not need to attach any peripherals, on its next boot, it will autologin as the Pi user, and start up Chromium and navigate to https://www.taplist.io/display. The very first time this boots, there will be a code on the screen that you need to go to https://taplist.io/activate and enter in.

WHEW! Thats it, hopefully you made it this far, and ended up with something like this

Cheers!

Sources

https://brandonb.ca/raspberry-pi-zero-w-headless-setup-on-macos
https://bdking71.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/setup-an-information-kiosk-using-a-raspberry-pi-zero-w/
https://taplist.io/help/raspberry-pi-setup

Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So, my thought process on this was pretty simple, I have been reading a bit on doing an all Brettanomyces fermented NEIPA. I started reading on Milk The Funk about different strains of Brett. The Brett Claussenii strain from White Labs caught my eye. Especially based on the flavor profile:

Fruity, pineapple. Wine grape-like aroma, with light wood-like, floral, and citrus aromas. More fruit forward in the flavor, clean aftertaste with little to no “funk”.

Upon my initial research on MTF there where a few bullet points that just made an all brett NEIPA sound perfect:

Light fruit characteristics.
A longer lasting hop aroma and flavor due to Brett’s ability to constantly metabolize micro-oxygenation.
Perceived bitterness may be quite a bit lower than the same wort fermented with a clean ale yeast.

These are all things, to me, that seem to lend perfect to a NEIPA. So, I went about planing a brewday. Was looking a for a pretty simple grain bill, and I went about a hop bill based on a recent NEIPA I had from Arvon Brewing, called Jurassic Haze that was amazing. Here is my Brewfather Recipe.

I picked up some WLP 645 from my LHBS, made a starter, and based on some reading I did you want to let it spin for a bit longer then a regular starter on the stir plate. I let it go for about 6 days, then crashed it for 2 days.

On to brew day. Long story short, brew day went perfect, hit all my numbers, pH and everything. Let it cool to about 75F, as the temp range of the brett was 70F-85F. I pitched the brett, set my BrewPiLess to raise the temp from 75F to 85F over 14 days and then I started the waiting game.

Brewday Whirlpool:

Now this beer was a little pricey, the 6 gallons of wort was probably about 70-ish dollars, so I was watching pretty close to make sure fermentation took off, especially being a completely new yeast method to me. Anyway, after day 1, nothing. After day 2, nothing. No krausen, no CO2, nothing. Im starting to get worried. Well, I went back to MTF and did a bit more reading, guess what, brett C, does NOT attenuate wort well when pitched solo, like, it only attenuates 20%! Long story short, if your WLP645 fully attenuates, its contaminated with sacc, see this.

DAMNIT! FML!

So, being, the person I am, I panicked, not knowing what else to do, I decided to pitch some sacc yeast. I mean what else could I do? I really didn’t want the wort to get infected and waste all of it. So, I called my LHBS, They had some Omega Labs Tropical Ale yeast OYL-200. This is a great yeast, it was actually formally classified as a brett. Its great for both IPAs and NEIPAs, and well, its brett-ish. And it has a temp range of 70F-85F, perfection! So I pitched that in at about 52ish hours post brett C. pitch.

Within 12 hours, thing was bubbling like a tommy gun, I’m sure it helped it was at about 77F by this time. Now, I also decided to make another small change this batch, no biotransform hops. Now, incase you are not aware, at the start of the NEIPA craze, it was common practice to pitch dry hops at the peak of fermentation, about 24-72 hour in. Well, this has since been “proven” wrong and wasteful of hops as all the aroma is taken out with the CO2. So I decided to pass on this step, instead trying to dry hop closer to packaging. Well, this damn thing bubbled for almost 2.5 weeks, and dropped to 1.005 on my first hydrometer reading, then I waited another 4 days, and it was at 1.004 (which I’m calling terminal gravity), so I added 3.5oz of hops, let it sit another three days, kegged, crashed and carbed. The finished product is very good, to be honest, a little wierd, but a one of a kind. lots of pineapple, honestly a lot of funk from the brett, very fruity, surprisingly full bodied, and over all, a very solid drinker!

Tag: 3dprinting

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About

About me hmmm; where to start… well, I like beer. I like to make beer, I like to drink beer. I also like to talk about beer, and making beer.

Do you need anything more then that? Well if so, you can keep reading… Beyond beer, I am a Husband and Father. I have been in the tech game for the better part of a decade. I work primarily with Microsoft Hyper-V, the Systems Center Suite, and a lot of PowerShell. I have several published PowerShell Modules, Scripts and Functions, you can find them on the PowerShell Gallery published under the username @dotps1. I have decided to abandon the dotps1 handle. Why? Doesn’t matter and I don’t have much more to say on that at this time.

Outside of who I am, I have a few hobbies; Homebrewing (obviously), 3D Printing, Mountain Biking, and Disc Golf. Although, to be honest, with my family and a full time career, I don’t do half of those as much as I’d like, and don’t do the other half as much as a should.

I homebrew mostly on the free time I get, most brewdays are time consuming so it tends to be an entire Saturday. But, the one thing homebrewing has really opened up for me is DIY projects. Things like temperature controllers. Which got me into 3D printing so I was able to make parts at home. Which got me into 3D design, So now I’m making parts that never existed before, improving on a base model, or adding features.

I love to pedal, and its one of the few things I do to somewhat be active. I pedal single track and on the road. Although, less on the road these days because peoples eyes are on their screens and not road in front of them. If I just lived somewhere a bit warmer, I could do it all year. But until then, Ill just keep cultivating mass in the winter months.

As far as Disc Golf goes, been doing it my whole life, just need the clock to open up some time for me to do it again.

What you can you plan on finding here?

Lots of brew day experiences, most of the time, something goes wrong. Sometimes worse then others, which should lead to some interesting homebrewed tales.
Probably some of the most obscure tech experiences that you’ll ever find, with fixes that neither you, or anyone you’ll ever meet will ever need, ever.
My what I’d do different if i did it again on DIY projects, from a fully functional BrewPiLess, to a prop Iron Man Reactor and stand (The stand I had to design from scratch and it turned out quite well.)
And maybe after enough beers, some really stupid rants on things like religion, god, death, politics, social culture, and possibly even some bullshit about movies.

Still here, impressive; this has probably been the worst About page you’ve ever read, (if you’ve even made this far). Bottom line is I’m just another lost soul doing things I somewhat enjoy to make time have some meaning. I’m overly eccentric, I over think absolutely everything, I always assume the worst, but, sometimes, just sometimes, amongst all my self induced anxiety, I get to laugh a bit too, so cheers!

Tag: diy

Tag: dsc

Tag: homebrewing

ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml

Convert the terrible output from Get-AppLockerPolicy to something worth a damn.

Motorizing Your Grain Mill

How to turn your hand powered grain mill into a motorized one.

Nobody Got Time For That

45 minute mash, no boil, Kveik HaziBoi, grain to glass in 5 days.

Tag: klipper

Tag: powershell

Tag: raspberrypi

[ { "title" : "ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml", "url" : "/convertfrom-applockerpolicyxml/", "category" : "powershell", "tags" : "powershell, windows", "date" : "2021-03-02 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Convert the terrible output from Get-AppLockerPolicy to something worth a damn." } , { "title" : "Motorizing Your Grain Mill", "url" : "/motorizing-your-grain-mill/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing, diy", "date" : "2019-08-21 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "How to turn your hand powered grain mill into a motorized one." } , { "title" : "Nobody Got Time For That", "url" : "/nobody-got-time-for-that/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing", "date" : "2019-08-14 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "45 minute mash, no boil, Kveik HaziBoi, grain to glass in 5 days." } , { "title" : "Replace Failed Storage Pool HDD", "url" : "/replacing-failed-storage-pool-hdd/", "category" : "powershell", "tags" : "powershell, windows, server", "date" : "2019-08-05 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Replacing a failed hard disk drive in Windows Server Storage Spaces Storage Pool." } , { "title" : "Installing PKI SSL Certificate on HPE iLO", "url" : "/installing-pki-ssl-certificate-on-hpe-ilo/", "category" : "powershell", "tags" : "powershell", "date" : "2019-07-25 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Automating the process of creating a CSR and signing it with an Internal CA and installing it using PowerShell." } , { "title" : "Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3", "url" : "/using-bltouch-with-klipper-and-the-ender3/", "category" : "3dprinting", "tags" : "3dprinting, klipper", "date" : "2019-06-04 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "How to make your BLTouch Sensor work with the Klipper firmware and the Crealty Ender3." } , { "title" : "Klean Yer Keezer Lines", "url" : "/klean-yer-keezer-lines/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "keezer, diy, 3dprinting", "date" : "2019-05-09 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "How to easily clean and rinse your keezer beverage lines." } , { "title" : "CIP DIY Keg Washer", "url" : "/cip-diy-keg-washer/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "keezer, diy", "date" : "2019-05-07 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Clean your kegs, the easy way." } , { "title" : "PiLess BrewPi", "url" : "/piless-brewpi/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing, raspberrypi, 3dprinting", "date" : "2019-05-01 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "Building a BrewPi without a Raspberry Pi using the BrewPiLess implementation." } , { "title" : "Taplist Pi Zero", "url" : "/taplist-pi-zero/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing, raspberrypi, keezer", "date" : "2019-04-26 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "A walk through for creating a digital taplist with Taplist.io and Raspberry Pi Zero." } , { "title" : "Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)", "url" : "/mixed-ferm-neipa-first-attempt/", "category" : "homebrewing", "tags" : "homebrewing", "date" : "2019-04-17 00:00:00 +0000", "description" : "An overview of creating a mixed fermentation NEIPA." } ]

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Tag: server

// // IMPORTS // @import "reset"; @import "variables"; // Syntax highlighting @import is at the bottom of this file /**************/ /* BASE RULES */ /**************/ html { font-size: 100%; } body { background: $black; font: 18px/1.4 $helvetica; color: $lightGray; } .container { margin: 0 auto; max-width: 740px; padding: 0 10px; width: 100%; } h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-family: $helveticaNeue; color: $lighterGray; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.7; margin: 1em 0 15px; padding: 0; @include mobile { line-height: 1.4; } } h1 { font-size: 30px; a { color: inherit; } } h2 { font-size: 24px; } h3 { font-size: 20px; } h4 { font-size: 18px; color: $gray; } p { margin: 15px 0; } a { color: $blue; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; &:hover, &:active { color: $blue; } } ul, ol { margin: 15px 0; padding-left: 30px; } ul { list-style-type: disc; } ol { list-style-type: decimal; } ol ul, ul ol, ul ul, ol ol { margin: 0; } ul ul, ol ul { list-style-type: circle; } em, i { font-style: italic; } strong, b { font-weight: bold; } img { max-width: 100%; } // Fixes images in popup boxes from Google Translate .gmnoprint img { max-width: none; } .date { font-style: italic; color: $gray; } // Specify the color of the selection ::-moz-selection { color: $blue; background: $darkGray; } ::selection { color: $blue; background: $darkGray; } // Nicolas Gallagher's micro clearfix hack // http://nicolasgallagher.com/micro-clearfix-hack/ .clearfix:before, .clearfix:after { content: " "; display: table; } .clearfix:after { clear: both; } /*********************/ /* LAYOUT / SECTIONS */ /*********************/ // // .masthead // .wrapper-masthead { margin-bottom: 50px; } .masthead { padding: 20px 0; border-bottom: 1px solid $darkGray; @include mobile { text-align: center; } } .site-avatar { float: left; width: 70px; height: 70px; margin-right: 15px; @include mobile { float: none; display: block; margin: 0 auto; } img { border-radius: 5px; } } .site-info { float: left; @include mobile { float: none; display: block; margin: 0 auto; } } .site-name { margin: 0; color: $lightGray; cursor: pointer; font-family: $helveticaNeue; font-weight: 300; font-size: 28px; letter-spacing: 1px; } .site-description { margin: -5px 0 0 0; color: $gray; font-size: 16px; @include mobile { margin: 3px 0; } } nav { float: right; margin-top: 23px; // @TODO: Vertically middle align font-family: $helveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; @include mobile { float: none; margin-top: 9px; display: block; font-size: 16px; } a { margin-left: 20px; color: $lightGray; text-align: right; font-weight: 300; letter-spacing: 1px; @include mobile { margin: 0 10px; color: $blue; } } } // // .main // #main { margin-bottom: 6rem; } .posts > .post { padding-bottom: 2em; border-bottom: 1px solid $darkGray; } .posts > .post:last-child { padding-bottom: 1em; border-bottom: none; } .post { blockquote { margin: 1.8em .8em; border-left: 2px solid $gray; padding: 0.1em 1em; color: $gray; font-size: 22px; font-style: italic; } .comments { margin-top: 10px; } .read-more { text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 15px; } } .wrapper-footer { position: fixed; bottom: 0; width: 100%; margin-top: 50px; border-top: 1px solid #ddd; border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; background-color: $darkGray; } footer { padding: 10px 0; text-align: center; } .fab, .fas { color:$blue !important; padding: 5px; } .pager { text-align: center; } // Settled on moving the import of syntax highlighting to the bottom of the CSS // ... Otherwise it really bloats up the top of the CSS file and makes it difficult to find the start @import "highlights"; @import "gists";

Tag: windows

@import "jekyll-theme-primer";

Sitemap: {{ "sitemap.xml" | absolute_url }}

{% for post in paginator.posts %}

{{ post.description }} {{ post.excerpt }}

{% endfor %}

{% for post in paginator.posts %}

{{ post.description }} {{ post.excerpt }}

{% endfor %}

{% for post in paginator.posts %}

{{ post.description }} {{ post.excerpt }}

{% endfor %}

ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml

Motorizing Your Grain Mill

Parts list

Wire it up

Nobody Got Time For That

Water

Mash

Boil

Whirlpool

Ferment

Dry Hop

Drink Up

Replace Failed Storage Pool HDD

Identifying a failed HDD

Replacing the HDD

Installing PKI SSL Certificate on HPE iLO

Manual steps

Breaking Down The Code

Using BLTouch with Klipper and the Ender3

Values You’ll Need

Get Configuring

Configure The Z Offset

Update

My Ender3 Klipper printer.cfg

Klean Yer Keezer Lines

Build It

Use It

CIP DIY Keg Washer

Sources

PiLess BrewPi

Enter the PiLess BrewPi

Shopping List

Pro Tip

Time to make the chimi-f***ing-changas

Install the BrewPiLess bin on the ESP8266 NodeMCU

Soldering

Assembly

BrewPiLess Configuration

Extra Credit

Time for a Cold One

Taplist Pi Zero

taplist.io

Setting up the Raspberry Pi Zero

Configuring Raspbian Lite Stretch

Sources

Mixed Ferm NEIPA (First Attempt)

Tag: 3dprinting

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About

Tag: diy

Tag: dsc

Tag: homebrewing

ConvertFrom-AppLockerPolicyXml

Motorizing Your Grain Mill

Nobody Got Time For That

Tag: keezer

Tag: klipper

Tag: powershell

Tag: raspberrypi

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Tag: server

Tag: windows

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