Articles

Have you ever left your apartment and couldn't remember if you locked your front door or not? Sadly, if it is unlocked, there is not much you can do about it until you get back home. This system is an attempt to solve the problem. Simply put, it consists of attaching an actuator to the door's original locking mechanism control it with through WiFi.

GitLab provides Kubernetes integration out of the box, which means that GitLab CI/CD Pipelines can be used to deploy applications in Kubernetes easily. This guide presents how to integrate a Kubernetes cluster in a GitLab Project and follows Gitlab documentation. For this particular case, the cluster will be that of a Microk8s Kubernetes distribution.

Air conditioners consume a fair amount of electricity. As such, forgetting to turn one off before leaving one's home can result in an expensive electricity bill. This is a Wi-Fi enabled controller for air condtioners, which can turn the unit on or off according to MQTT messages. It is built around an Wemos D1 mini and interfaces with the AC using an IR LED.

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.