Making sure my bsides Canberra 2023 badge doesn’t end up in a drawer and forgotten.

I’m getting sick of fixing my TV remotes. Universal remotes are all over priced monsters. So instead I thought I’d wack together an IR blaster from the spare parts draw. The goal here I thought it would be easy, infrared remotes use decades old technology. I wanted to use an ESP8266 I had laying around for its WiFi. Surely its a popular project with millions of guides and examples to work off?

Standing on the shoulders of giants still requires climbing to the top of a fricken giant.

Wasting nothing, I wanted to use the lil’ temperture sensors that my obsolete Corsair fan controller game with Such a cutie Somehow it took me way too long to determine that they are 25k NTC Thermistors. Mainly because many fancy thermistor libraries for arduino out there support a huge list of types, with no indication of what is the most popular. After this feat of detective work, I can basically hand the rest of this post to adafruit’s fantastic guide on how to use it surprisingly accurately with an actual algorithm to get a temperature in Celsius.

I’ve got a whole bunch of fancy Noctua PWM fans in my PC I want to control the speed of. How do I boss them around? The most authoritative source of how these fans communicate is from an Intel specification. Even better is a whitepaper by Noctua themselves that describes every detail you could ever want to know. Cos numbering pins is for suckas Okay so at least we aren’t going to be reverse engineering these fans.

Possible? Worth doing?