Articles

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.

Have you ever bought a piece of clothing only to come home and realize you already had a similar one in your wardrobe? This happened to me the other day so I decided to fix the problem. To do so, I designed a simple web application in which the user can keep track of all the garments they own.

Publishing articles on a website can be as simple as uploading HTML files to a web server. However, writing articles in raw HTML can be time consuming. A content management system (CMS) is an application designed to solve this issue by providing a simple way to create and manage web content directly from the web browser. There are many CMSs available, namely Wordpress or Joomla but I decided to create my own as a form of practice and in order to have it highly customized to my needs.

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.

RFID tags are great but often easy to lose. To solve this problem, I designed this case for an RFID tag, which can be worn on one's wrist using a standard watch strap. The case was designed using Fusion360 and then 3D printed.

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.

With the cloud native multi-user MQTT platform deployed, I started designing IoT devices that I could distribute to end users. However, without a GUI, interacting with those devices would be difficult. Of course, one could install applications like MQTT dash or similar but this would require tedious configuration such as MQTT broker and topics. I wanted to give users a simpler UX so I made this simple control interface that automatically displays a users devices and allows those to be controlled.

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.

An IoT RGBW LED controlled via MQTT with integrated motion and illuminance sensor.