March 9, 2025

Adding Zigbee2MQTT to my "VanAssistant"?

In my previous blogs about the VanAssistant i showed you that it is wise to assemble a nice good case around your Raspberry Pi. We configured that Raspberry PI with an m2 SSD in a NAS case. That case has room for ventilation, a fan and less important some nice lights. The blog after that I configured a router to be used with the RaspberryPi. I opted for a RUTX50 from Teltonika.

February 18, 2025

MQTT or Modbus for my "VanAssistant"?

The VanAssistant project is not going that well. Not to much related to technical issues, but more or less relative based. I will not dive deeper into this, but we had some strange weeks going on. When starting the project VanAssistant I wanted to have everything running over MQTT. It is the reason to change my router to the Teltonika. I must admit, it was heavy to get things working. But i managed being able to communicate with the router… But not how it should be…

January 21, 2025

Project "VanAssistant" - Setting up the Teltonika RUTX50

The what? Ok. The Teltonika RUTX50 is an industrial grade router with good, very good characteristics for a CamperVan. I have choosen this one because: 5G network availlable Two sim slots Good Wifi Coverage Has 4 lan ports Running on OpenWRT (!) Several specific packages like TravelMate, MQTT and more Power range from 9 to 50V, which means you can connect straight to campervan power (with a fuse off course.) Next to that, I could buy a new one at a good price.

January 8, 2025

Project "VanAssistant" - Setting up your RPI

Lets make a first start of the VanAssistant today. What are going to do? We are going to prepare a Raspberry Pi (4 or 5) to become a VanAssistant server. I call it VanAssistant now because we will adapt some settings on the hardware to make sure that we can control a lot of stuff in our CamperVan/Mobile home or RV or whatever we call them. This setup will also work in various other situations where your Home Assistant must run independent of where it is.

January 8, 2025

New Project "VanAssistant"

A short one today. I have had a non humourous last year. My family and me went through some deep holes as we call them. Real friends know what all happened and I would like to keep it that way. Time to leave that behind. I want to start something new. Last year I switched teams. Now I am in team that does a lot of Azure related services around Data and Analytics.

October 16, 2024

Switching Jobs and my first experiences at GDP

As some of you know I decided to move teams within Rabobank. This is something I have been working on for a long time. In my life as a SQL Platform engineer (automating the full stack of SQL Server deployments in the bank), I started to gain interest in the vision of their product Trident (yes.. Back in those days). The product is now named Fabric. For Rabobank I went to Seattle to attend SQL PASS Community.

June 12, 2024

Sources from Data Saturday Croatia 2024

A short one today. In my previous post about Data Saturday Croatia I promised to publish the sources I used for preparing my presentation. Yesterday I published them to my Github account, so it is time to do a litle round of explanation again. I have revised the files a bit by adding probably valuable comments. The link to all my presentations can be found here, despite this is the first one that I really publish on my github presenentations page.

June 8, 2024

Data Saturday Croatia 2024

It is a wrap. Data Saturday Croatia is done. After a few weeks of preparations and a lot of frustration it is done. My session is finished. The session was about how you could aggregate your Audits or Extended Events together with Defender in one place and how you can find it back. I showed the audience how to configure your on prem servers, and also Azure SQL components, for sending additional data to the Log Analytics workspace.

May 28, 2024

Changes in Azure MI Policies - Are we affected?

One of my friends created a post on changes in the Azure Managed Instance (later: MI) policies today. Reading his post covered some drawbacks why he was not that happy with them. Even me, when reading his post. And only reading that post it made sense to me as well. It was a reason for me to open a discussion in the LinkedIn. My first opinion was that he was right and I still think his explanation fits.

January 9, 2024

T-SQL Tuesday 170 – Learn Fast, fix over time

This months invitation for T-SQL tuesday came from Reitse Eskens (B | L | T). The original invite can be found here. I know Reitse quite well. He lives in the same in country, I visited one of his user groups, congratulated him on getting an MVP award, volunteerd together with him on two activities this year. I hope to continue this also this (2024) year. His invite Reitse’s question to the SQL Family is to share what we have learned from failed projects.