Articles

Smartwatches can be rather expensive and tend to be known for their poor battery life. On the other hand, Xiaomi's Mi band 2 is cheap and its battery lasts for up to 20 days. However, the Mi band 2 is mainly limited to fitness tracking functions, at least without the appropriate apps.

Wifi controlled smart light bulbs can now be purchased from less than USD 10. However, those can often only be used by a specific application provided by the vendor and can involve exchanging data with a third party server. I wanted a solution to use my own software while benefiting from the cheap hardware so I replaced the wifi module of a a cheap Wifi light bulb my own electronics.

Global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic are some the many challenges humanity is having to face. However, I somehow decided that the problem I was going to solve is having to take my keys out of my pocket whenever I lock or unlock my front door.

Mosquitto is usually the first candidate to come to mind when looking for an MQTT broker. However, by default, Mosquitto manages users using a password file. This makes it difficult to easily add or remove users, especially when the broker is deployed in Kubernetes.

Smart lights are usually some of the first appliances to be added to a smart home. Although those can nowadays be purchased easily from various brands, I wanted to have my own hardware so as to integrate it better with other devices and software. Thus, I decided to an IoT LED controller that I can use in various projects where lighting has to be controlled via network protocols.

Previously, when creating a Vue project using the Vue CLI, the Vue Router could be installed easily by running vue add router. However, with Vue 3 and Vite, the router is installed manually. This article presents how to do so.

A Node.js application which stores data from IoT devices sent over MQTT into an InfluxDB time-series database. It allows the management of multiple data sources into a MongoDB database.

Although probably in the decline, infrared is a common way to remotely control household appliances such as air conditioners or TVs. Being able to turn on an AC unit without leaving the sofa is definitely comfortable, but sometimes it would be even better to be able to do it before even getting home. In order to control those various appliances, I designed a simple WiFi controlled IR emitter.

The SONOFF S20 is a cheap Wifi smart socket that enables the remote control of appliances for less than USD 10. Although the hardware is more than decent, its usage requires a proprietary app which most likely involves a third party server between the user and the device. Since the socket uses an ESP8266 at its core, I decided to write my own firmware for it.

I got my hands on a 600W 12V inverter so I decided to experiment with generating my own electricity.