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…
I toyed a bit with the Paradox security protocol last year, tapping into the keypad’s interface in an attempt to decode the messages being exchanged between the base station and the keypads. I had some success: I was able to…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
I created a Node-RED RFM2Pi gateway few weeks ago, have it running nicely since then. I decided to use that approach instead of a python script, since it is very flexible, visual and easy to extend. Prior to Node-RED I used the…
I sometimes have home automation projects that require detecting AC voltage (on/off only), previously have experimented with non-contact AC detection. Here is another approach that may be more suitable for low-power AC detection node: using a NE2 neon lamp and…
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…
I have published the Eagle design files for the Funky v3 and YAPM projects here and here respectively for anyone interested to try them out. A quick re-cap – Funky v3 is a miniature low power battery operated Arduino Leonardo…
I live in a small village ~25km from Sofia, Bulgaria and commute daily to the city. My house’s alarm system would occasionally ring me and I would rush back home to see if all is fine, that can be pretty…
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…
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…
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…
I fiddled with a new keypad today, this is not the first time I have a keypad project, but this time I want it to act as a USB keyboard instead. This is a convenient way to enter numeric data…
I accidentally landed on a site called ‘quantified self’ last month and immediately realized I am doing lots of lifelogging myself. I track my commutes, log my weight, my body temperature when sick, my hot water usage habits, visitors to…
I log the AC mains voltage at my house starting July 2013, you may recall my post where I was concerned about the unusually high voltage readings at home. Now that I have few months of data collected, it is…
I use Google Analytics on this blog to track visits and have collected statistics for couple years now. I toyed with these a bit today to see where are the visitors from, just out of curiosity and for no particular other reason.…
It has been a while since my last post, I have a new job and little time left for hobby stuff 🙂 Anyway, I have put together the PCB for the Yet Another Power Monitor (YAPM) project and was able to…
I have finally found some time last weekend to finalize my smart hot water tank controller project, finalized the code and have it now running for a week. I also put up a small and simple html page to control…
I am working on a smart IoT controller for my solar hot water tank and I need to be able to control its mode of operation over the Internet. My plan is to have the controller subscribe to an emonCMS…
As I mentioned the other day, I have Funky v3 PCBs waiting to be populated/tested. I did finally have some time to do that, here is how they look: I plan to use this particular one to run tests, so…
I added a 6 pin port on the RFM2Pi board that can be used for a number of applications. The port has GND, D3, D7, D6 and VCC routed, and by no coincidence matches perfectly the pinout of the Digole…
I have made a major reshuffling of the Funky v2, added 8 more pins to the side headers while keeping the form factor. I had to go for ‘pads’ instead of through-hole to make this possible: The newly…
I seem to be doing power monitoring projects a lot, started with this one, then moved on to this, then this and now I am again putting up a power monitor.. This particular will be using a small transformer with…
I started collecting electricity usage data in April 2012, and wanted to check how am I doing this year compared to last year. Of course, as of today, only few months overlap (May-August), but still that will give me some idea…
I was thinking about the accuracy of the battery measurements the other day, are these accurate or not? I measured the battery using Fluke 27 multimeter and compared that to the readout using the internal bangap method and found a small difference.…