2020 | Arik Yavilevich's blog

Real-time location tracking of individuals or things that are important to you

Dec

19

2020

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 ...

Integrating 433Mhz smoke detectors with Home Assistant 13

Oct

13

2020

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 ...

Convention for compile time configuration of PlatformIO projects

Sep

20

2020

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, ...

Making a proper adapter board for the “smart” WiFi Rinnai 2

Sep

4

2020

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 ...

Changing a “dumb” Rinnai water heater to a smart one 31

Aug

18

2020

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 ...

Repurposing unused steering wheel buttons as generic macros for an Android head unit 14

Jun

16

2020

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 ...