Articles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.