Yes, sure! You can buy a Sonoff RF and you are good to go, I guess. But I didn't and I was not so sure about the no-named RF receiver so I ended thinking about adding my own. But first things first. The Sonoff is an ESP8266 based smart switch by ITEAD which comes with custom firmware that communicates with the manufacturer cloud to provide “smart” capabilities like remote switching or scheduling....
The Rentalito is a never ending project. It began as a funny project at work using an Arduino UNO and an Ethernet Shield, then it got rid of some cables by using a Roving Networks RN-XV WIFI module, after that it supported MQTT by implementing Nick O’Leary’s PubSubClient library and now it leaves the well known Arduino hardware to embrace the powerful Spark Core board. Spark Core powered Rentalito - prototype Spark Core The Spark Core is a development board based on the STM32F103CB, an ARM 32-bit Cortex M3 microcontroller by ST Microelectronics, that integrates Texas Instruments CC3000 WIFI module....
In my last post about counting events with Arduino and PCF8583 I talked about this “yet another weather station” project I was working on last summer. The station was deployed in the garden of a cute apartment we rented in an old “masia” near Olot, 100 km north of Barcelona. It is in the mountainside, surrounded by woods and 10 minutes walking from the near town. It has a beautiful garden with plenty of space....
Hey! I've been away for some time. It's not that I had stopped tinkering, but work and laziness have kept me away from the blog. During these months I have been working mostly on a new weather station (yes, yet another weather station or YAWS). The project was a step forward in a lot of aspects, from carpentry to remote reporting hacking cheap chinese routers and 3G dongles, from new libraries for Arduino to a bidirectional HTTP to MQTT bridge in node....
My last project is a über-cool Geiger-Muller Counter. Final box, with a LCD showing the last average CPM every 6 secons and sending the info to the server every minute... Hardware: Radio Hobby Store Geiger Counter Radiation DIY Kit (second edition) Some weeks ago I suffered a radioactivity fever, so to speak. I backed the APOC Mini Radiation Detector at Kickstarter and also bought a Geiger Counter Radiation Detector DIY Kit from Radio Hobby Store at Ebay....
“Say Hello to The Rentalito!” That was the first message The Rentalito displayed almost 2 years ago. The Rentalito means something like “small rental monitoring thingy” (free translation from “rental” and “ito”, which is the suffix for “small” in Spanish). It was born to display the rentals in a VOD project my team was working at that time. The Rentalito displayed total rentals, rentals by day and it beeped every time a new rental showed up in the database displaying the movie that was just rented....
[Update 2013-03-01] I have added more documentation on the codes these remotes use in a different post. I'm starting to move towards not only gathering information but also acting. My first project in this subject will be controlling some lights and the house heaters. So last week I visited the urban market of “Els Encants” in Barcelona and bought some very cheap wireless outlets. Two different remotes I bought two sets of three wall plugs, each set with it's own remote....
This is going to be the last post for the smart meter pulse counter setup series. I want to wrap up several things like the final hardware, the code and the data visualization. Final hardware This is what the pulse counter sensor looks like, almost. The final version that's already “in production” has a switch to hard-reset the radio from outside the enclosure. Nothing special otherwise. Everything goes in a socket so I could reuse the components, the photocell probe connects to the 3....
This week I have had some spare time - well, I should say I've borrowed some time from my sleep - to work on the smart-meter pulse counter setup. In my last post about this I analized the signal from my photocell sensor. My conclusion was that the signal was clean and neat, even before throwing in a schmitt trigger to make it more “digital”. I have found out that it is also very dependent on the environmental light so I good isolation is a must for the sensor....
