The Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit card sized computer, is a popular choice for home automation projects. I am running few of those at home myself. But what is the true cost of these, is the advertised cost of $35 really all…
Physical vs Virtual
Speech generation with Node-RED
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…
Exposing Raspberry Pi’s network setting files to /boot so that they are visible on a PC
I needed to clone my current Raspberry Pi SD card image to use for another headless project (on another network), but then realized the network settings were my home ones. I had access to a PC only, so could not…
Monitoring my home automation system uptime
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…
Duck DNS updater in Node-RED
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…
Improving my home automation system’s Data Quality
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…
DIY Internet of Things Fire Alarm
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…
You watch too much TV
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…
Live streaming to USTREAM.TV using Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi nest camera project turned out interesting, but provides static images upon motion detection. I’d rather have a live view of the bird’s nest and decided to go for live ustream.tv streaming. Setting up the software for it…
House martin cam
A common house martins couple started building their nest in an unfinished tool shack at the far end of my yard few days ago. I still don’t have a door or window on that building, so they can enter and leave freely.…
Presence detection using phone’s WiFi and Node-RED
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…
Voice controlling things with a smartphone and Raspberry Pi
I am not a big fan of voice control, but this particular project turned out quite practical. What I wanted to achieve is to pick up my phone, speak out a command and so control connected things like my TV, heat…
In-memory SQL analysis of emonCMS feed
It often happens that I need to know the the min/max/average values of an emonCMS feed or do basic data analysis/querying, I was running a SQL query on the database end to get my answers. In some cases, however, one…
Control LG smart TV over the Internet using a Raspberry Pi
Here is a quick home automation project: controlling a LG smart TV over the Internet using a Raspberry Pi computer. There is a Python script already developed for that, so getting all this working was a 5 minute effort. The…
Tweeting my house’s power usage as sparkblocks
Sparkblocks are a text-only version of the sparkline charts, using just unicode symbols. These are a convenient way to represent trends in pure text, quite useful when you want to use SMS, tweets or even the subject line of an…