This weekend, I finished writing the battery voltage monitor for the Hackulator. While doing research about how to display the battery voltage in the menu for the Raspberry Pi, I initially came across some information that developing plugins for LXPanel was the way to go. However, it seems the Raspberry Pi PIXEL environment is a highly customized version of LXDE and I was unable to find information of how to create a plugin. However, did notice that there is an existing plugin called "System Tray" which is part of the menu by default, so I looked in that direction and came across some python code that uses GTK+ to display an icon in that system tray. In fact the code I came across was for a battery monitor that read some system information about the battery and showed a representation there.

I was able to adapt this code to work with my existing python code that read the MCP3002 instead of the system and now it's working great. I just need to find the best way to run this on startup and it should be finished. My plan is to take a similar approach for the keypad, except I'll be doing that in C since I'm more comfortable doing low level stuff there. However, if it turns out rewriting my keypad driver in Python is easier, I'll go that route.

I finished installing the camera mounting adapter and put everything back together. Unfortunately, while looking through in different light, I noticed that the camera was set in a little too deeply. I made some adjustments to the design and made the camera inset about half a centimeter less, thickened the plate that it bolts onto, reprinted it, and reinstalled it and it's perfect now.

Another project that I started working on this weekend was hacking an HDMI switch. What I am trying to do is make it so that it can be controlled remotely with OpenHAB and I wrote a quick driver. After uploading it, it wasn't connecting to the MQTT server. I plan on getting it working on a NodeMCU first and then trying again. Basically, I have it connected to the output for the 4 LEDs to get which port is active and the button to trigger it to advance to the next one. My plan is for the software to figure out the current port and just advance it the appropriate number of times to get to the desired port.