Lazy smoke away
Smoke from soldering is not healthy to breathe. I built this easy fix a while ago. Continue reading
View ArticleThe coolness of RGB LEDs
Intro Ahhhh LEDs….don’t we love them? Today there is a huge variety of them. But there is one type I particularly like. These 5 mm RGB diffused LEDs, easily available from various sources and quite...
View Article10002 Control panel horror
Intro I have been making some slow progress with my smart home project. I have completed a small assembly run of motion sensors, there are plenty of things that are working and I shifted some focus on...
View ArticleNew 3D printer
Intro My first 3D printer was a Prusa i3 clone, which I got as a kit, installed and made some changes to reduce noise. It proven to be full of problems. I could never print ABS with it, there were...
View ArticleGPP-4323 power supply review
Intro I spent quite a bit of time trying to design a digitally controlled power supply. I even have some prototypes and three articles, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. One day it hit me: across the years, I...
View ArticleThe basil speaks to me
Intro Part of my home automation system is monitoring the well-being of various other non-human species around the house. So i started with the plants. Since they are mostly fixed creatures and...
View Article10002 Short assembly run no 2
Intro It is quite clear that my smart home project is going quite slow and erratic. Following the other assembly, I made another batch of 5 sensor nodes. These are meant to use the new soil sensors,...
View Article10002 Zen
Zen At some point I though about building the smallest PCB for a sensor node that I could. Hence, the ZEN was born. The PCB is small enough to fit on a holder of 2 AA batteries. Where I have only build...
View Article10002 Screens and controls
Intro There is no point in having a smart home if you don’t see interesting information or control things. The traditional way, ever since the concept of smart home came to be, is to have some sort of...
View Article10002 I2C connectors
Intro In my first iteration of sensors I relied on wire connections between sensors and the actual node board. The result for a motion sensor and a temperature and humidity sensor looks like this The...
View Article10002 Server
Intro In my initial thoughts about the smart home system architecture, the server was most likely a raspberry pi: At that time it seemed the PI was apt for it. And a raspberry pi 2 served me well for a...
View ArticleThe basil speaks to me – Part 2
This is highly experimental But of course, once the soil moisture is read out, it’s only a matter of time before automatic watering has to happen. Add one beefy (..ish) MOSFET and a small pump You get...
View ArticleFast 3D printed boxes
Intro Finding the proper box for my sensors is not easy. But even after finding one that mostly worked, I wanted to explore more sensors and still have a bit of freedom while doing that. Of course,...
View ArticleTechnology I want
Intro Sometimes in life you find that there is a piece of tech you would like to have but it’s not there. Well, here’s my list. In general, things in the list are either a combination of things or...
View ArticleTP-Link KL50 smart light bulb teardown
Intro When I saw this KL50 wifi light bulb on sale, I thought I want to grab one and see what is inside. A quick search revealed no details about the insides of filament WiFi light bulbs. Short review...
View ArticleIkea TRÅDFRI review
Intro Part of my home automation project I would have some controllable lights, of course. On one hand, I used quite a few LED strips, controlled by dimmer modules. On the other, current technology...
View ArticleThe stupidity of thin laptops
Disclaimer: don’t take this article too seriously, it’s a rant. But it does highlight the problems in the industry. The need My 7 year old laptop needs replacement and I thought I would go for a more...
View Articledriving a string of anti parallel LEDs
Intro I have quite a few strings of LEDs with clips for photos. Never thought it was much more than a gimmick when i got the first one, but they do make for nice and personal decor with the photos...
View ArticleESP-NOW
Intro The wireless sensor modules I built for my smart home are doing fine in terms of battery life without much effort. Typical life is 1-1.5 years for AAA powered and more than double that for AA...
View Article10002 The hidden database
A long due update A while back I setup influx DB to store the sensor and activity data on my smart home system. And i thought the raspberry pi 3 was not enough to run the server anymore. And moved to a...
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