Introduction I have a Home Assistant-based Smart Home in my apartment. Many of my electronic devices are connected to HA and I can monitor and manage them centrally. The main communication method for all the devices is Wi-Fi with Zigbee being a second option. Some time ago I wanted to monitor several processes outside of … Read more
A year ago I published an article about a very simple Vibration Logger using an Arduino Uno, an SD card and an accelerometer. Recently, the need to measure vibration came up again, but this time I wanted something better. A device that will let me monitor the readings from anywhere without the need to go … Read more
Recently I have had to monitor the operation of a system of pumps over a period of a few days. Monitoring in person would be a waste of time and would be a pain to do at night. The operation state of the pumps can be determined by the vibration of the system. When the … Read more
When I was taking my young kids to the park or playground I wished I had a solution that would tell me where they are in case they go out of sight. This led me to a project where I made a system to tell me in which direction (AKA bearing) and how far a … Read more
Smoke detectors are simple and effective means for saving lives and reducing damage to property in case of a fire. You should use smoke detectors in your house even if your local regulations don’t require you to do so. All smoke detectors make a loud beeping alarm sound if smoke is detected, but some models … Read more
Separation between code and data (specifically configuration data) is a critical concept in any development environment. Having worked a lot with the nodejs stack I found the way configuration is handled in embedded Arduino/PlatformIO projects surprisingly messy. I decided to come up with a convention to simplify this and I will describe it below. tl;dr, … Read more
This is a quick follow-up post to my previous article about converting a Rinnai heater device to a smart device and controlling it with WiFi. Previously, when making the board that connects between the ESP32 and the traces of the Rinnai control panel, I did something that is not per-spec. I was using the ESP32 … Read more
This article covers a home automation project, in which I extended a control panel of a Rinnai gas water heater with an ESP32. The ESP32 then functions as an interface between the control panel and Home Assistant, a home automation software. tl;dr, the ESP32 sits as a MitM (proxy) on a few data lines inside … Read more
This article covers an automotive project, in which I connect unused buttons on my car’s steering wheel to a micro-controller, which in turn emulates a keyboard and mouse device to the car’s infotainment system via USB. tl;dr, the buttons form a resistor ladder and I use an STM32 black pill board to read the state … Read more
With the release of Android 8.0 (“Oreo”), I as well as others have noticed that they cannot find some HM-10 clone BLE modules when scanning for them with an Android 8.0 phone. Why is that happening and what can you do about it? tl;dr, the issue is due to a bug in the firmware of … Read more