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This is a wireless motion sensor that runs on rechargeable batteries. It can be deployed anywhere and sends a signal using an NRF24L01 wirless module whenever it detects motion.

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.

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.

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.

While at university, two friends and I registered as a team for the <a href="https://robot-competition.epfl.ch/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">EPFL robots competition</a>. The objective of the competition is to build a robot that would collect PET bottles inside an arena and bring them back to a collection area. We figured the robot would need to be designed with a storage space as well as some form of path finding algorithm if we wanted it to be able to carry bottles to the collection area so decided to simply skip the step. Instead, we designed the robot as a bottle cannon that would shoot the bottles in the collection area.

This is an IoT ceiling light controller which includes an HC-SR501 PIR motion sensor. It is built around a Wemos D1 mini (ESP8266 breakout board), which controls a homemade TRIAC breakout board. TRIACs provide the advantage of switching devices on and off silently, as opposed to a mechanical relay.

Although a wide variety of sensing devices can be envisioned for home automation systems, motion and temperature sensors are among the most widespread. This is mostly due to their low cost and simplicity of use. In order to equip multiple rooms of my apartment with such sensors, I designed a simple IoT sensing module that can easily be produced in any quantity.

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.