Tinkerman

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....

I'm working on a project were I have to build a network of battery powered sensors over a territory the size of a small town.The sensors will monitor power consumption, temperature and humidity in energy poor households. Often the families in that situation can't afford an internet connection at home so WiFi is out of question. GPRS would be an option but lately other radio technologies have come to my interest....

Moving from the ESP8266 world I've been diving lately I still love the simplicity of battery powered Moteino nodes. You might know I'm migrating my XBee-based sensor network at home to an RFM69 one. So long I have changed my door monitor and my weather station. They are sensing and reporting to my RFM69GW, an ESP8266 bridge board using a custom firmware. Time to go for the power monitor. A long time ago (actually 2 years but it really feels like a century ago) I was living in a big city and we had one of those fancy “smart meters” with a LED pulsing 4000 times every kWh....

November was a busy month and the Sonoff Dual that IteadStudio kindly sent me to review was bored in a box waiting for some free time. But it was just fair that another board that has been waiting in the boards-to-review box for longer had it's chance to have some fresh air too. So here we have the Itead Studio Sonoff Dual and the Electrodragon ESP Relay Board face to face....

My daughters love to talk to (or with) my Amazon Dot [Amazon US] in their funny English: “Alexa, hello!", “Alexa, li-on!” (actually “light on”). It's so easy to use it to switch on/off things at home using the fauxmo python script by Maker Musings. In his post about Amazon Echo and Home Automation more than a year ago he explains how he reverse-engineered the protocol of the WeMo switches that Alexa (Amazon Echo [Amazon US] orAmazon Dot [Amazon US]) supports....

Some months ago I wrote about a hack I did to one of my Sonoff devices to be able to use a simple current sensor to monitor my washer machine process and alert me whenever my laundry was done. A few weeks ago Itead Studio released two new models for their Sonoff line, the POW and the DUAL. And the POW is Itead's answer to my hack. I'm not saying they copied me, just that the Sonoff POW makes my hack utterly unnecessary....

The HLW8012 is single phase energy monitor chip by the chinese manufacturer HLW Technology. It features** RMS current**, **RMS voltage** sampling and **RMS active power** with an internal clock and a PWM interface in a SOP-8 package. You can buy it at Aliexpress for less than a euro a piece and the necessary components are fairly easy to source and quite cheap. All in all it looks like a great IC to include power monitoring in your projects....

A few week ago I had a really good time testing 4DSystems 4Duino-24 board. One of the things I noticed is that the Serial Command Set interface is really flexible. You can easily drive the display from an 8-bit microcontroller. But you can also use more powerful controllers like an ESP8266 or an ARM machine like a Raspberry Pi or even my laptop. 4DSystems provide libraries for all those platforms and others....

A few weeks ago I wrote about my new door monitor. It was the first step towards migrating my XBee based wireless sensors network to RFM69 radios using Moteino platform by LowPowerLab. I was truly impressed by the low power consumption so I committed myself to keep on working with them. Coincidentally Felix Russo, the guy behind LowPowerLab, released the new version of it's Weather Shield for Moteino. So it was time to update (or completely revamp) my trusty Arduino FIO based weather station… and last week I received a parcel from LowPowerLab with a pair of shields to play with: the new WeatherShield R2 and the PowerShield R3....

Itead Studio keep on creating interesting products for the hacker community. A few weeks ago a new version of the already classic Sonoff TH came to life. This new version comes in two flavours: the Sonoff TH10 and TH16 and you can buy them at Aliexpress: Sonoff TH 10A/16A Temperature And Humidity Monitoring WiFi Smart Switch. In this article I will briefly talk about what's new in this device to quickly go to explore one of those novelties: it's external interface....