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…
Raspberry Pi kernel with Frame Buffer TFT support
The 1.8″ TFT display that I use with my Raspberry Pi is really fun, but setting the kernel to work with it was a nightmare. Not any more thanks to the work of @notro. With the following instructions, you can…
Rock-solid RFM2Pi gateway solution
I have had a good share of frustration with damaging Raspberry Pi SD cards due to wearing out/improper shut downs as a result from power failures and was looking for solution to this sort of problems for a while. At first…
Raspberry Pi root file system in read-only mode
I have found my Raspberry Pi running the root file system off a USB flash drive in no good state this morning, the following error showing up on emoncms that was installed locally: Can’t connect to database, please verify credentials/configuration in…
Raw infrared <> serial
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…
Installing emoncms’s “events” module
I use emoncms to log telemetry readings from various sources (wireless sensor nodes, software bots etc), the so logged data helps my IoT connected gadgets make decisions, based on pre-defined rules. For example, my heat pump monitors outside weather conditions (temperature,…
Pong clock on Raspberry Pi + 1.8″ TFT
There was a blog post on http://raspberrypi.org couple days ago about a pong clock, these seem to be quite popular these days. A simple search on hack-a-day shows dozens of such projects, so the idea is not new. Still fun…
Putting Raspberry Pi’s hardware watchdog to work
As I continue my quest for reliability of my Raspberry Pi computer, I stumbled upon something interesting that I didn’t know existed – hardware watchdog for Raspberry Pi. For those hearing this term for the first time, a watchdog is…
Moving the root file system of Raspberry Pi to external USB drive
I have had enough of damaged Raspberry Pi SD cards due to frequent power outages here. This week I have ended up with damaged SD card number three and had to take measures to prevent this from happening again and…
Tweeting coffee machine using Raspbery Pi
Here is a small project for social network connected home appliance, done for the sake of fun, but provides a good learning experience. I will be connecting my coffee machine to Twitter since I am one of the 6 people…
Raspberry Pi email/SMS doorbell notifier + picture of the person ringing it
I have been receiving requests to build a SMS doorbell from all around the world ever since my SMS doorbel project got featured on hackaday, damnGeeky, hackedgadgets and few other places . My approach is relatively difficult to follow, so I decided to…
Auto reconnect WiFi on Raspberry Pi
For a number of reasons I have my DD-WRT-based router shut down WiFi at nights, that though causes some inconvenience to my Raspberry Pi. I have it connected with a RTL8188CUS based WiFi dongle, the cheapest found on eBay. The problem is that…
TCP/IP over RFM12B and Raspberry Pi as gateway
I have always wanted to connect my remote RFM12B -based nodes to the Internet, I have finally managed to do so. It was relatively easy, based on the excellent work of Adam Neilsen with his SerialIP library SerialIP is a port…
Siri-like voice chat with Raspberry Pi : keep kids busy for a while :)
Here is a fun project to try out: a Siri-like voice talk with your Raspberry Pi, its a lovely way to attract youngsters and keep them entertained for a while. I use three components for the project, code is mainly…
The Raspberry Pi TFT PCB arrived
The Raspberry Pi TFT PCB that I described here has arrived yesterday; I quickly soldered my TFT on it and gave it a test. ll works great, here is a small demo:
Raspberry Pi TFT board
I enjoy my DIY TFT board so much that I decided to create a more permanent setup. I laid out a board design that will have non-rectangular shape and supposedly fit better on-top the Pi. Here is how it…
Using my 1.8 TFT as a Raspberry Pi status display
I have been experimenting with my Raspberry Pi TFT display these few days with the intention to use it as a misc status display, heavily influenced by Mark‘s work. I collect most of my house’s telemetrics to an emoncms installation running on…
New RFM2Pi board in the works
Glyn Hudson and I have been working on a new RFM2Pi board revision, nothing revolutionary, just a small upgrade. The most important features of the board are: Atmega328 based, has more memory and hardware serial support Runs on the internal…