Articles

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.

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.

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...

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

I am not much of a cook so salads are usually one of my favorite options for a healthy meal. So, just like for everything else, I started wondering if I could make my own. However, I don't have access to a garden so I started looking into solutions to grow vegetables indoors. I settled for hydroponics, which seemed to provide a good balance between yield and operational hassle. Specifically, I went for a Deep Water Culture type of hydroponic system as it is usually considered easy for beginners to setup.

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.

As part of a previous project, I installed an IoT lock on my front door, which allowed me to control it using my smartphone. However, having to take out my smartphone every time I want to unlock the door quickly becomes annoying. To improve on the situation, I installed an RFID reader on the lock, which I used in combination with an RFID ring which now serves as my key. To follow up on this trend of finding new ways to unlock my door, I decided to explore face recognition technologies.

I've been using&nbsp;<a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Home Assistant</a>&nbsp;to control my home IoT devices for a while. Although it fulfills all my needs, I wanted to make my own system so as to get a fully customized smart home control panel and learn how to build such an application in the process.