Tag "itead"

Six months ago I was reviewing the AiThinker AiLight, a great looking light bulb with an embedded ESP8266EX microcontroller, driven by a MY9291 LED driver. Just before summer IteadStudio released it's Sonoff B1 [Itead.cc] light bulb, heavily inspired (probably same manufacturer) by the AiLight, at least on the design. Now that IteadStudio has become popular between the home automation community you can also find the Sonoff B1 on global marketplaces like Ebay or Aliexpress for around 13€....

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....

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....

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....

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....

Some weeks ago I received a parcel from Itead. Previously, I had written about the Sonoff and they were kind enough to send me two more of their home automation products for me to review: the S20 Smart Socket I wrote about two weeks ago and the Slampher. The Slampher comes in a simple cardboard box with no documentation at all... just visit their wiki! The Slampher is kind of a Sonoff RF that sits before any light bulb with an E27 screw....