I bought one of these keypads off ebay few days ago, and decided to try it out. These work pretty straight-forward, you have 8 pins – 4 for rows and 4 for columns. When you press a button, it creates…
RFM2Pi firmware updates
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…
Funky LED candle
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…
Funky as remote temperature sensing node with DS18B20
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…
USB on the Funky
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…
Clocking the Funky sensor from RFM12B’s crystal
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…
RFM12B to Raspberry Pi board
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,…
3D modelling of PCB designs
@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…
Super ‘Funky’
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,…
Interfacing ‘Funky’ to Raspberry Pi
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…
Measuring humidity and temperature with DHT22 and Funky
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…
Clocking ATTiny84 from RFM12B (thinking outloud)
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…
Updating my SMS doorbell
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…
‘Funky’ sensor in store
I have received permission from Tobias Floery to offer my version of the Funky Sensor in the store. I will be offering three options PCB only – for those that can do the soldering and only need the PCB “Regular” Funky…
Hooking my wireless doorbell to the Internet
Here is a fun project: hook my wireless doorbell to the Internet and get SMS when someone rings it. Useful when I am not at home or am in the backyard and can’t hear it, but I carry my mobile…
RaspberryPi+TinySensor as EmonBase
I now have working setup with a TinySensor + Rasberry Pi acting as an emonbase. I previously used PHP for this task, but the PHP serial class seems to have some issues on the transmission part plus it was a…
Solar Funky
I thought it would be a nice experiment to put the Funky in a solar-powered garden lamp. I got one recently with the intention to use it for that particular experiment, it is quite cheap, costs a little over one…
64 800 transmissions
The CR2032 battery powered TinySensor that I had set up to monitor my house’s power consumption has stopped sending packets yesterday afternoon, totaling 7.5 days of transmissions every 10 seconds. That would mean 6 * 60 * 24 * 7.5 =…
Getting Funky
Catchy title, right? I ordered some Funky Sensor PCBs after few days ago and got them today. Just to recap – this is an extremely small Attiny84 based sensor with RFM12B module on top. I can’t stress how small it…
CR2032 powered “current only” remote monitoring
I am experimenting these days with one of the old versions of the TinySensors trying to see how long it can go with some heavy duty tasks, powered only by a single CR2032 battery. I wrote a small sketch to…
TinySensor Wiki
I have created a TinySensor Wiki, it is available from the top menu and this link. I will be extending it as time permits.
TinySensor 1.4 PCB is ready
I now have the TinySensor v1.4 in my hands, there are some small improvements over the version I last published, most notably that I added a 3.3V FTDI connector. You can’t use it to program the Attiny (..yet, I am…
Setting up Arduino IDE for working with Attinys
There are a number of posts on the subject already, but I’d like to share my experience as well. Here are the steps I undertook to set up my environment for working with Attiny84 and Attiny85: As a first step,…
DIY soil moisture sensor project
I have been working on a small DIY soil moisture sensor project the last couple days, mostly inspired by the gardenbot project. The idea is to add it to my greenhouse monitoring project. I chose to make my own sensor…
TinySensor v1.4 plans
I have been working to upgrade the TinySensor v1.3 to a new version these days, that addresses the issues I had identified so far. I am keeping it in through-hole components for easy soldering and also so that one can easily…
Using a LDR (light dependent resistor) and DHT11 temp/humidity sensors
I got my hands on a LDR yesterday and figured that it will make a nice addition to a greenhouse monitoring project that will pick up light intensity, air temperature and humidity plus soil moisture and send that information to…
RFM12b to serial PCB for my Pi
[edit] This board is now available for sale in my store Here is a little project that I worked on last weekend: A small home-made PCB to permanently fit the RFM12b-to-Serial on my Raspberry Pi. Although I am aware of at…
Stamp sized ATtiny84 remote sensor
I have been amazed by the work done by @Tobias with his “Funky” sensor, so I asked him for a permission to make my own version. The Funky is a JeeNode micro clone, less the two Jeeports and probably in…
Using ATtiny 84’s internal temperature sensor
I have always wanted to test the internal temperature sensor that the ATtiny84 has. I think it is quite nice for a really low power node since no external hardware is required. I googled for some time and found a…
Power saving techniques for the Attiny84 powered TinySensor
I have been working hard to cut power consumption on the TinySensors so that they can run on the CR2032 battery that is on the back of the PCB. I have one of the sensors is sending room temperature for…
Capture, decode and log to emoncms RFM12B packets on Raspberry Pi
With the RF12Demo sketch running on a TinySensor permanently hooked to my Raspberry Pi, my next step was to be able to capture the RFM12B packets that are being sent by various remote sensors in my home. Using the minicom…
RF12 Demo sketch for ATtiny84
I ported the RF12Demo sketch by Jeelabs to use with the TinySensor. My plan is to have it run while the TinySensor is connected to RaspBerry Pi’s UART so that I can both receive and send data packets. A PHP script…