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