I was invited to do a tech talk by DEV.BG a few weeks ago, and I chose to discuss my recent heat pump upgrade project, the integration with the existing PV system, and Home Assistant. The tech talk was in…
The PS Thermo is a smart thermostat project developed by me, consisting of a control hub (that also acts as a gateway) and various sub-GHz RF wireless sensors/actuators. In essence, it is a much more advanced version of the BBoilRF…
I decided to test a 3.5″ TFT version of the TFT32 project as the original version’s 2.4″ 320×240 TFT is a bit small-ish. The TFT I chose is an ILI9488 480×320 3.5″ with resistive touch. The upgrade was pretty straightforward,…
I did a tech talk about my ESP32 based IoT control hub project on Feb 5th, 2019 at Work & Share Coworking Space Sofia. Over 100 people signed up for the event organized by DEV.BG, it was a pleasant surprise…
My recent IoT projects are capable of performing OTA firmware updates, I have previously blogged about the importance of this capability. I normally use MQTT over SSL as a means of communication between the edge nodes and the cloud backend,…
Accurate time/date information is crucial for the correct operation of IoT nodes. From a security perspective, time/date information is necessary to perform SSL certificate validations. If your embedded device’s clock isn’t accurate, you can’t ensure the presented server certificate hasn’t…
I am working on a thermostat control project using the TFT32 hardware, let me share a video of the Wi-Fi configuration GUI (still work in progress). The Wi-Fi provisioning via GUI addresses one of the significant challenges when setting up…
Those of you that follow me on Twitter might already know that I’ve been working on an ESP32 based IoT control hub/gateway project with touch TFT lately. Let me describe what problems I am trying to address with this project.…
We have a 4.88m x 2.74m x 1.22m (13m³) Bestway swimming pool in the backyard. We only use the pool when the pool water temperature is > 25°C, but it only happens if there are intensive sunshine and high ambient…
We use a DIY air-to-water heat pump for climate control (heating/cooling) of our house with a combination of water underfloor heating and fan coils in the rooms. The fan coils are equipped with basic thermostats that allow for heat/cool mode setting,…
This blog post is about a project I have been working on lately, the BBoilRF. It is a general purpose internet-connected relay actuator/gateway with support for low power, battery operated remote wireless sensor nodes. It was designed primarily for use…
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…
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…
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…
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…