With quite a few RFM2Pi boards out there, some issues started to pop up. When using the board to send time packets to emonGLCD, the board would interpret random serial gibberish as valid command and would switch its nodeID to…
I got myself Santa brought me a new laptop couple days ago, an Asus K56CM. I am no brand slave, I just pick one that fits the budget I set aside and what covers my basic requirements. I prefer not to spend…
I now have my evacuated tube solar water heater disconnected from the house’s plumbing system and in ‘winter mode’ meaning that I am crossing fingers it doesn’t freeze and break the tubes :). It does have electric heater element inside,…
Now that I have a PHP script that can find out my physical location, I wanted to calculate how far from home I am. Since ‘home’ is a fixed GPS coordinate and my actual position varies, I needed a method…
There is probably a million LED candle projects already, so I had to give it a try too :). I used bare Funky PCB and an ATTiny84 – no need for anything else indeed.The Attiny is set to run on…
Having breakfast this morning, we found that we have some old bread left that was about to be thrown to the trash.. or maybe not. Since it is winter now, birds are having hard time finding food, why not build…
Here is a small project with some potential in home automation. I had an idea to create a script, that would track my (and not only) location and use that information to make decisions for home automation. Some ideas: Climate…
I wanted to have quick access to certain measurements on my home monitoring system, most important the two hot water tanks (solar and heat pump) temperatures and room temperatures. I could, of course, have my laptop to check these, but…
I have been researching these days on the possibilities to use ultra low power sources for the Funky sensor. I started my research with the idea to power a Funky from a CT wrapped around a power line. This is…
Having gained experience with the Funky sensor, I am starting thinking on how to further improve it. One of the things I recognized, is the somewhat difficult programming, the user is required to install Attiny84 core and to own an ISP programmer in…
There is quite some buzz in the RFM12B community recently on low power remote receiver nodes, these are remote, battery-operated nodes that would listen for incoming commands and react to them. The challenge is that keeping the RFM12B powered on all the…
With the winter heating season knocking on the door, I decided to measure the room temperature in every room in the house. The Funky is perfect for the purpose, as a DS18B20 temperature sensor can be soldered directly on its…
I recently came across a neat little (literally) project called MicroFTX. It is incredibly small USB to serial adapter board based on FT230XQ (datasheet) from FTDI’s new X-Chip series. I thought it would be neat to throw in some native USB support…
I guess that many Internet surfers that land on this site, actually wonder what is it that I am working on all about. I realized that indeed, it may be a good thing to describe it as well, putting it…
I have received the e-meter PCB and started making it. I forgot to buy couple elements and the 2×8 header won’t fit due to wrong footprint, but other than that it looks good:
I finished the painful assembly of Simon K.’s Micro Web Server, but was too tired afterwards to see if it works. With all these tiny SMD components, there is always the chance that something goes wrong. So today, I finally…
I have mentioned already, that I purchased Simon K.’s micro Web Server and have his permission to develop it further, see my micro IoT gateway post. I received it couple days ago but only had time to put it together…
I have started work on creating a wiki for the Funky sensor – find it here
I would typically think of a boost regulator in the case when I’d like to step-up voltage, and such were my intentions when I introduced the LTC3525 boost regulator chip on the Funky sensor. The idea was to be able to…
I have already expressed my thoughts on this, and of course could not resist materializing them. The main reason is that I would like to experiment with IR and RF stuff that requires precise timings. The internal oscillator’s frequency depends notably on…
I have decided to discontinue the TinySensor project and focus on Funky Sensor as they overlap a lot as functionality. These of you following my posts, know that I have a working prototype for a dedicated board for RFM12 to Pi connectivity,…
This is a little heads-up for those of you (includes me) that don’t want to dedicate a mouse and keyboard to their Pi and would rather use their laptop’s mouse and keyboard. This is a bit different from running remote…
[Edit] I have now undertaken another approach, worth checking it out here I recently purchased a 4.3″ TFT LCD screen, originally intended for attaching car backup cameras with the intention to use it as a status screen for my Raspberry…
Earlier this year I purchased a 220l non-pressurized evacuated tube solar heater and installed it myself on my rooftop. It is a relatively cheap (~440 Euro) solution for domestic hot water. I chose the non-pressurized type because of its simplicity…
As I already mentioned, I planned to have a RFM12B shield for the micro IoT gateway. Here is how it is looking, rendered in 3D, still work in progress, but the idea is clear. I wanted to keep the shield…
@Gadjet from http://www.gadjet.co.uk/ showed off some nice 3D renderings of his projects the other day in JeeLab’s forums and had me all excited about it. He used EagleUp, some nice peace of software that turns your Eagle PCB layouts into Google Sketchup…
I have long wanted to make my own Internet of Things gateway and I wanted it small. I have researched for quite a while on the options, and finally decided to base it on the excellent work done by Simon Küppers…
Tobias’s original ‘Funky’ had voltage regulator, that I removed in my version in favor of a voltage step-up circuit. How about having both on the Funky and you will decide which one to use depending on the concrete application? Well,…
I am finding myself using Funkys for all of my recent projects, so I am thinking of discontinuing the TinySensor. I think the better approach would be to have various ‘shields’ for the Funky rather having hardware on board that…
I have been playing with DHT11 for some time, only to find out that this sensor is a bad joke. I finally decided to upgrade to the DHT22, which is a magnitude better than the previously mentioned one. I wanted to be…
I have been thinking on the possibilities to use external clock source for my ATTiny84 projects for some obvious reasons. Using the internal oscillator works great in most cases, but may not be so accurate in some applications (IR,RF) as it…
I have made some updates to my SMS doorbell project. Previously, I had troubles setting up the email notifications in emoncms, the problem is that I don’t have shell access to the server where I host it so I could not…