I'm having some busy weeks again and the blog is suffering from my absence :) I had a bunch of comments to accept (please remember all comments are being moderated). And even more projects pending (including a new version of the ESPurna firmware). But I just wanted to let you know that I will be at the Barcelona Maker Faire next June 17 & 18. Hope to see you there, it will be fun for sure!...
There are so many ways to tell the time. DIYers have been doing clocks since the Ancient Egypt (obelisks lacked portability, thou). Every modern maker has a clock amongst her first projects. I have done some myself, including a fibonacci clock, a wordclock with a fancy green matrix effect and an unreleased project that hopefully will see the light someday soon. But recently I came back to the idea behind the wordclock before, to extend it in different ways:...
After a busy month I decided to spend some energy on doing hardware instead of software and the result was the ESPurna board I posted about just yesterday. The goal was to have a device based on the ESP8266 I could fit into my house wall gangs, with an SPDT relay to work with multi-way switches and power monitoring using the same IC the Sonoff POW uses: the HLW8012. As a side project today I've been searching on the box of the TODO projects and I have rescued a KEMO STG15 [Ebay] plug housing with socket....
If you have read me, you might know I have a firmware for ESP8266-based smart switches called ESPurna. The firmware integrates with Alexa, Domoticz, Home Assistant and about any other service that supports MQTT or HTTP REST APIs. It supports a variety of devices, including almost the whole Sonoff family by Itead Studio, but also some other commercially available boards and light bulbs, and open source hardware projects as well....
Following the bright path (sic) of the Ai-Thinker AiLight / Noduino OpenLight I wrote about a few weeks ago, now it's turn for one of those devices you purchase but once they arrive they are stored in the TODO box until they eventually come back to life. The Magic Home LED Controller [Aliexpress, also available from Ebay] is an ESP8266 based single-color RGB(W) LED strip controller. It works with every 5050 LED strip [Aliexpress] out there....
A while ago I wrote about how to use PlatformIO with PunchThrough Lightblue Bean in a post here on how to use the new Bean Loader CLI from PlatformIO. Of course the reason for that was not merely being able to do it, but having a agile development environment to do something useful with them. I've been looking for a paper I had read a few weeks before I started playing with the Beans....
One might think that one of the typical uses for a smart wireless switch (like Sonoff devices) is to be embedded behind a normal wall switch so it becomes a “smart” wall switch. It may seem obvious but it's not that straight forward. There are several things that get in the middle. Most (all?) the boards have momentary push buttons while wall switches are (normally) toggle switches Most of the available boards in the market are SPST, even those with SPDT relays often only provide terminals for COM and NO, not NC....
Sometimes Chinese manufacturers throw a mysterious, unlabelled, IC into their designs so we can spend a few hours trying to figure out what they are and what they do. It's such fun! I've been playing with one of those this afternoon, trying to answer those questions but also trying to understand why! Why is that chip there? Why did someone decided she needed that chip there? Some weeks ago a user of ESPurna asked me if the firmware supported Itead's 1CH self-lock/inching board....
Lately I've been quite busy with the ESPurna firmware. It's growing bigger and gaining some momentum. It's really fulfilling to see other people using it and reporting back. But at the same time it's very time consuming. Last Saturday I released version 1.5.0 with some new functionalities and bug fixes and I decided to use some of my free time over the weekend to work on a project that's been waiting for a month in the shelf....
Last December Itead Studio updated their Home Automation product line with a new and different product. The main difference is that it doesn't have a relay and it's mainly sensors and no actuator (if we don't define a notifying LED as an actuator). The Sonoff SC is a sensor station that packs a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, a GM55 LDR, an electret microphone with an amplifier circuit and a Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F [Aliexpress] dust sensor in a fancy case that looks like it was originally meant for a speaker....
