My recent IoT projects are capable of performing OTA firmware updates, I have previously blogged about the importance of this capability. I normally use MQTT over SSL as a means of communication between the edge nodes and the cloud backend,…
I am flooded with all sorts of notifications on my phone and that gets a bit annoying after time. Email, calendar, SMS, social apps, instant messengers, all sorts of push notification alerts and so forth mean I physically pick my…
IFTTT (short for “If This Then That”) is a popular service which lets you trigger actions based on certain events that occur around the Internet. It is missing an important functionality (IMHO), namely WebHooks. A WebHook is an HTTP callback: an…
I’ve set up a uptime monitor for my home automation system so that I’m notified when it is down. Such event could mean two things: either Internet connectivity issue, or system is down due to power failure, crash etc. The service…
Dyn and No-IP have been for long time my choice for dynamic DNS, but both have recently made steps towards commercializing their services and implementing monthly confirmation process. I think it is time for me to move away and look for…
Data Quality is one of the areas I have been neglecting in my home automation system so far. As a result, I seem to be capturing some ‘garbage’ data along with the good quality data. Bad data can affect downstream…
I purchased a battery operated smoke/fire alarm few days ago and it showed up today. It runs on 9V and will make a loud sound if smoke is detected. My intention was to hook it up with my home automation system…
I have the feeling that my teenager son spends too much time in front of the TV. We have a house rule that he is allowed to watch TV only after all homework is done, room is tidied up and for no…
Nathan tweeted a cool idea couple months ago, use static IP lease for your phone, ping it every minute to see if it responds, and if the ping times out that most probably means that the phone and his owner…