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 is provided by UptimeRobot and is free. It can watch over your system by pinging…
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 alternative. DuckDNS seems to be exactly what I was looking for, easy to use, reliable…
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 logic, resulting in hard to predict the behavior of the system. It is, of course,…
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 so that I would receive alert if it would go off including SMS, pushbullet notification…
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 see the keys being pressed, but what was more important to me was the state…
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 more than couple hours a day. Of course, this rule is hard to control unless time spent…
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 is pretty straight forward using these instructions, only I use a RaspiCam instead of USB…
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. My kids are curious and keep peeking into the shack, sometimes scaring the little birds…
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 are not at home: I found ~15 minutes to implement this today in Node-RED, couldn’t…
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 great OEM gateway script by Jérôme Lafréchoux. My inspiration to switch to Node-RED were Nathan…