Articles

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.

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

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.

One day I got fed up with my solder spool rolling around all the time so I designed this simple spool holder in Fusion360 and 3D printed it.

Managing one's body weight can be quite a challenge. And as the quote from Peter Drucker goes, "You can't manage what you can't measure". So, I built a body weight scale that can upload data to an API of my choice, which was the object of this article.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us cannot participate in family gatherings or other similar events in person. Instead, some opt for video-call applications like zoom, but then get constrained to the field of view of camera of the device used for the call.

Keeping track of one's body weight usually involves manually writing down measurements on a spreadsheet or similar. To automate the process, I removed the electronics of a cheap scale, keeping only the load cells, and replaced it with my own.

I recently started using Grafana to visualize my apartment data. Although I can easily open a browser tab to view the dashboard I created, I wanted to have a standalone display dedicated to the task that I could put on a shelf of my living room.

When you don't know how much power your air conditioner draws, it's easy to leave it running without feeling too guilty. And then the electricity bill comes...