I now have my evacuated tube solar water heater disconnected from the house’s plumbing system and in ‘winter mode’ meaning that I am crossing fingers it doesn’t freeze and break the tubes :). It does have electric heater element inside,…
Calculating distance between two GPS coordinates
Now that I have a PHP script that can find out my physical location, I wanted to calculate how far from home I am. Since ‘home’ is a fixed GPS coordinate and my actual position varies, I needed a method…
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…
Bird Feeder
Having breakfast this morning, we found that we have some old bread left that was about to be thrown to the trash.. or maybe not. Since it is winter now, birds are having hard time finding food, why not build…
My Raspberry Pi knows where I am..
Here is a small project with some potential in home automation. I had an idea to create a script, that would track my (and not only) location and use that information to make decisions for home automation. Some ideas: Climate…
Emoncms data on my phone
I wanted to have quick access to certain measurements on my home monitoring system, most important the two hot water tanks (solar and heat pump) temperatures and room temperatures. I could, of course, have my laptop to check these, but…
Ultra low power sources for wireless nodes
I have been researching these days on the possibilities to use ultra low power sources for the Funky sensor. I started my research with the idea to power a Funky from a CT wrapped around a power line. This is…
Atmega32U4 based micro node with RFM12B
Having gained experience with the Funky sensor, I am starting thinking on how to further improve it. One of the things I recognized, is the somewhat difficult programming, the user is required to install Attiny84 core and to own an ISP programmer in…
Low power receiver options
There is quite some buzz in the RFM12B community recently on low power remote receiver nodes, these are remote, battery-operated nodes that would listen for incoming commands and react to them. The challenge is that keeping the RFM12B powered on all the…
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…
What is this all about?
I guess that many Internet surfers that land on this site, actually wonder what is it that I am working on all about. I realized that indeed, it may be a good thing to describe it as well, putting it…
E-meter PCB ready
I have received the e-meter PCB and started making it. I forgot to buy couple elements and the 2×8 header won’t fit due to wrong footprint, but other than that it looks good:
Using Jeelab’s EtherCard library on the Micro Web Server (uIoT)
I finished the painful assembly of Simon K.’s Micro Web Server, but was too tired afterwards to see if it works. With all these tiny SMD components, there is always the chance that something goes wrong. So today, I finally…
Putting together Simon’s Micro Web Server
I have mentioned already, that I purchased Simon K.’s micro Web Server and have his permission to develop it further, see my micro IoT gateway post. I received it couple days ago but only had time to put it together…