I need to brush up on my networking skills, so I thought that I would dig out the old hardware that I purchased back when I initially got my CCNA certification. I figured I’d first start with this ASA Firewall since many job listing I have been seeing for Network Engineer jobs have mentioned firewall configuration. I purchased this ASA in probably 2017 or 2018 and it was past end of life then (foreshadowing…..).
I populated the board with the Arduino board and the pin headers. Assembly was very straight forward. I added pin headers for the GND and +12V lines for testing purposes, in the future I’ll either add a barrel connector or just wire the power supply directly to it.
![[Pasted image 20251204102135.png]]
I used SimHub top program the Arduino via USB, connected the fans to the Right and Left fan channels and used a barrel connector that has screw terminals that was able to just slide over the GND/+12V pins.
While visiting family over Thanksgiving, my dog sitter let me know that an alarm was sounding in my garage. It turns out that alarm was the controller for our invisible dog fence (this is the one we have if you are interested https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Electric-Dog-Fence-Premium/dp/B00ZRPGLOC), stating that there was break in the wire.
A little explanation of how invisible dog fences work, skip ahead to the next paragraph if you are already familiar with the idea… The controller sends an RF signal down the wire which basically acts like a low power transmit antenna. From the controller, you can increase the RF power on the wire which makes the boundary line “thicker”, ie more distance on either side of the wire in which the dog will be shocked. The dog wears a collar that acts as a receiver for the signal, if the dog gets too close to the wire and the collar detects the signal, they will receive a shock. There are some additional features like adjustable correction levels, but that’s the basic idea of how they work.
I wanted to add Wind simulation to my Sim Racing setup. As you speed up/down you get more/less wind in your face, and you get directional wind in the corners. This helps with immersion by giving a sense of speed. The PC connects to the Arduino which provides the PWM control for the fans, and the fans are then powered by an external 12v power supply.
Software and hardware designs already exist for this, but they require that you build your own interface using an Arduino. SimHub is the software that most people use to integrate Arduino microcontrollers with sim racing software titles. SimHub allows you to choose and configure the type of Arduino you would like to use and automatically generates the Arduino Sketch file to interface with the hardware setup. The following image shows the Arduino design for a 2 fan setup using an Arduino ProMicro.
This blog was setup based on instructions provided by #NetworkChuck @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnE7c0ELEH8
I had to made a a few edits to his process/script to make it work for what I wanted to do. He wrote a python script which was intended to transfer images from an #Obsidian vault, but it only accounted for PNG files, I modified the regex to account for JPEG/JPG and GIFs also.
Regex edit for image.py
# Step 2: Find all image links in the format 
#images = re.findall(r'\[\[([^]]*\.png)\]\]', content)
images = re.findall(r'\[\[([^]]*\.(?:png|jpg|jpeg|gif))\]\]', content, re.IGNORECASE)
NetworkChuck also didn’t explain the process for setting up auto deploy on Hostinger which requires setting up a webhook from Hostinger that is triggered when a post is uploaded to GitHub.