Back in the pre-dad days - when my biggest responsibility was remembering my Steam password - I had time to tinker with all kinds of tech. Phones got custom firmware, speakers played synchronized music in every room, and I even built a bluetooth garage door opener. These days? I’m lucky if I can open the fridge without an audience.

Still, the itch to tinker never left. Enter: the home lab - a middle-aged man’s playground, minus the Legos (mostly). I always want to keep developing skills and learning when I can. Setting up a simple home lab has helped do just that.

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is how valuable source control can be. Especially when learning something new, I wind up changing code or tweaking configurations until I get a better understanding how things work and to get things working how I want…but changes don’t always work out. Instead of undoing my changes manually, I love being able to just make commits and being able to roll back if needed, or even just comparing my changes.

I know I haven’t introduced my home lab or smart home setup yet. But I recently bought a few new sensors and wanted to share some new theengs I set up.

See what I did there? 😉

Yes, I installed Theengs Gateway on a Raspberry Pi 4B so that it would act as a gateway between my bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensors and my smart home’s MQTT Broker. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol which is often used in IoT and smart home integrations. It does this via OpenMQTTGateway, and Theengs is like a wrapper around it so that it is easily stood up on a Raspberry Pi or other devices.