Słomkowski's technical musings

Playing with software, hardware and touching the sky with a paraglider.

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Welcome to my website! I’m Michał Słomkowski. I work full-time as a Java/Kotlin backend developer and Linux system administrator. Here, I usually write about my tinkering endeavors, electronics, hardware, software, and mechanical hacks. I live in Poznań, Poland. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can find the details on the About page. If you are in the area and want to meet or talk, let me know!

There are 36 articles on this website. The most recent articles have been published or updated:

, 10 min read, ~2300 words

Getting into Meshtastic with Orange Pi Zero 3 and E22-900M30S LoRa module

Getting into Meshtastic with Orange Pi Zero 3 and E22-900M30S LoRa module

Testing a Meshtastic node with an Orange Pi Zero 3 and an E22-900M30S (SX1262) LoRa module. I describe Armbian, SPI, GPIO configuration, and building an 868 MHz ground-plane antenna.

, 7 min read, ~1500 words

FFmpeg under Debian with NVIDIA NVDEC (CUVID) and NVENC support

A quick guide for FFmpeg with NVIDIA GPU support on Debian 13, including compilation and examples of hardware-accelerated video transcoding.

, 21 min read, ~4700 words

Isolated AC/DC power supply or testing station for 230 V devices

Isolated AC/DC power supply or testing station for 230 V devices

I describe the design and construction of an isolated AC/DC power supply and testing station built from a salvaged East German variac. It features variable AC output (0–330 V) and DC output (0–450 V) and integrates digital meters and safety features.

, 1 min read, ~230 words

Server resetter from Waveshare Ethernet Relay module

A quick project connecting a Waveshare Modbus Ethernet relay module to a motherboard's reset pin to have an emergency remote reset button.

, 3 min read, ~600 words

Modification of AC voltage/current/power meters for variacs

Inexpensive AC voltage/current/power meters can be modified to work with a variable autotransformer even at very low output voltages by separating their measurement and supply voltages. I present the modification of meters: Peacefair PZEM-020 and Sinotimer SPM003.

, 5 min read, ~1050 words

ABBYY FineReader 6 no-hardware-dongle hack. Investigating Rainbow/SafeNet iKey 1000 software protection dongle

Leveraging the deterministic nature of the rand() function, I successfully created a no-dongle crack for an ancient version of ABBYY FineReader 6.