I have been busy starting up an exciting new project the last few months, a joint effort with a team of highly enthusiastic, hands-on, broadly skilled contributors with the goal to design and develop IoT home/industrial automation solutions. Together, we established…
We are close to that time of the year when Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts. It is intended to save on energy use, however, studies have found this to be questionable, even contrary – energy use increases in some cases. The change itself…
I’ve blogged before why firmware-over-the-air (FOTA) updates are a must-have nowadays, however, my old AVR+RFM based projects were incapable of that due to the lack of external flash to temporary store the new firmware before it is flashed on the chip.…
I’m one of the lucky 200 that got their hands on the early beta of Espressif’s new ESP32 chip evaluation board. It is the “big brother” to the popular ESP8266, Espressif has though noted that it should not be treated…
The comments to my last blog post got me thinking if I had chosen the right RFM channel at home, obviously if the channel is noisy that directly affects reception and increases the error rates. I use the default 868Mhz setting…
I’ve mentioned my plans for this project during the IoT hangout session few months ago, it has finally materialized as working prototype. The blocker so far was the lack of ESP8266 RFM69 driver and free time on my end, so I’ve…
Now that we have connected our project to the local network, we are immediately faced with another challenge: how can we reach it? Using WPS/SmartConfig means we force the unit into DHCP settings mode, IP address is auto assigned by the router in…
The typical end-user of your IoT products wants them up and running fast, with minimum hassle once they bring them home. They don’t want to be presented with initial configuration mechanisms/options they don’t understand, and their enthusiasm quickly diminishes if…
There is no second opinion about the importance of version control, it is a must-have for any software project. The option for reversibility, concurrency and history of code edits is what makes it so crucial. I’ve been using mostly GitHub for…
As soon as I blogged about IoT and security few weeks ago, my blog got hit by a massive DDoS attack combined with daily hack attempts via WordPress’ backend and SSH. I’m dealing with both issues pretty successfully for now, but this is…
An intensive Distributed Denial of Service attack is currently undergoing on my blog, with HTTP request rates hitting thousands per minute. It all started few days ago when I received a message from my hosting service provider stating that my…
Here is a fun project for I did couple days ago: a tweeting ESP8266. The typical approach when dealing with such task (and probably the better) is to use a proxy service like ThingSpeak’s ThingTweet, PushingBox or by building proxy yourself with Node-RED or mqttwarn. It…
Connected devices and sensors are the fastest growing sources of data. Billions of records are being generated daily around the globe and data transported across networks to be consumed where needed. Security of data in transit or at still in that…
With the IoT booming nowadays, the number of connected devices grows exponentially and so does the related software that drives them. There is no doubt that Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) is a highly desirable – if not required –…
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…
I’ve already blogged about using Funky v3 and RFM-2-Pi with the HopeRF RFM69CW module, only I used it with JCW’s Jeelib as I wanted to keep compatibility with my existing RFM12B based sensor network. JCW has done great job in providing…
I’ve been meaning to try Josh’s 4-line change to the OneWire Arduino library that enables using the popular DS18B20 temperature sensor without the otherwise required external 4.7K pull-up resistor on the DQ line for quite some time now. It is sometimes…
The rumors for RFM12B’s end-of-life two years ago seem to have been highly exaggerated now and the popular RF module is still available in abundance. HopeRF has introduced a pin-compatible upgrade, the RFM69CW. The module itself offers improved sensitivity and range compared…
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…
I worked on creating a Internet connected humidistat last week using my open source WiFi relay project as platform. We observe quite dry air at our house, I suspect this is due to the fact that we use fan coils for heating/cooling. Humidity levels at home…
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…
Edit: The project is now available for sale in my shop, you can grab one here: The WiFi SSR board project changed a bit and I use classical relays instead of SSRs now. The reason is that SSRs tend to…
Thanks to all that participated in the IoT tech talk session that was held late yesterday, as promised I am adding a recording of the session It was suggested that the topic of the next hangout will be the ESP8266,…
I’ve been meaning to hold a video Google hangout session on IoT topics for some time now, how about giving it a try? I imagine it as informal 1 hr tech-talk with the following structure 35 min presentation of a…
The ESP8266 DHT22/LED blinker project grew into an M2M relay board project with the following features in mind: Relatively small (10x5cm) PCB Powered via the onboard power supply or externally via a micro-USB plug Has three 2A Sharp Solid State…
[Edit] Make sure to check my much more advanced example here The ESP8266 System-on-chip (SoC) has recently came out of nowhere and has been taking by storm the IoT DIY world. It is a $4.50 Wi-Fi capable chip that has remarkable specs, obsoleting…
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…
I’ve been unhappy with my old MQTT topic tree structure for quite some time now and did some thinking/research on how to improve it. Google pointed me to Tinkerman’s article on a similar subject, and I started planning on improvements. I will repeat…
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…