I have finally found some time last weekend to finalize my smart hot water tank controller project, finalized the code and have it now running for a week. I also put up a small and simple html page to control…
I am working on a smart IoT controller for my solar hot water tank and I need to be able to control its mode of operation over the Internet. My plan is to have the controller subscribe to an emonCMS…
I did a fun experiment this evening, clap controlling RF power sockets using Funky v2‘s radio module and a sound sensor breakout module. The latter is pretty cheap one, respectively low quality and performance: It has couple outputs: analog…
I have recently purchased a magnetic contact switch to toy with. These are really cheap sensors that are used to detect door (or window) opening/closing events. The principle of work is simple, the sensor consists of two parts: one is…
When you run a project on battery, you are always thinking on how to conserve power so that you run longer. In the case of wireless remote nodes you do that by sleeping a lot and only waking up briefly to…
Alex from insideGadgets had an interesting project last year on non-contact AC detection and I wanted to try it out and learn how it works. He hooked one leg of a 1M ohm resistor to GND and a wire to…
I purchased a Ciseco bistable/latching relay few months ago for the sake of trying it out. I don’t have a particular project that requires one, just wanted to toy with it. If you haven’t heard of this type of relays,…
When interfacing my gadgets to the physical world, I often need to deal with IR of all sorts: air conditioners, TV, audio equipment, media center and so forth. These are all of different brand, so naturally the IR protocol that…
My father had a leaking pipe accident last year, and it happened while he was away from his place for a week. The water was flowing for few days before he returned and that caused damage for thousands of Euro,…
I have made a small improvement to the Funky v2 by adding a reset button to the PCB. The lack of reset button in the previous releases caused some inconvenience when the sketch being run disables USB connectivity (for power-saving…
I have been experimenting the last couple days with a wearable electronics project – a wireless body temperature monitor/logger. The idea is to remotely monitor kids body temperature, if they are sick, and put up a status display with alarm…
I have updated my OLED status display project with an option for analog clock: I also experimented with drawing bitmaps, a thermometer is drawn to the right of the clock face that changes its reading according to the solar water…
@Dimitrios noted something very important in the comments to an earlier my post on low-power sketch: One of the things I noticed when I started playing with the RFM12B module was that the receiver front end was mostly overloaded by…
I sometimes need to quickly check on certain temperature reading and find myself walking to one of my status displays to see, for example, if there will be enough solar hot water for a hot tub. I figured, it would…
I have been uneasy with the conversion time that the DS18B20 temperature sensors have, it is 750 ms when using the 12-bit resolution: The 12-bit resolution is the default power-on, so when powering the sensor from a digital pin, you…