Code | Arik Yavilevich's blog

Thingy:91 cellular vibration sensor

Jul

26

2023

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 ...

Arduino Vibration Logger 2

Feb

18

2022

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 ...

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, ...

Changing a “dumb” Rinnai water heater to a smart one 33

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 ...

Should you throw away your CC41 HM-10 clones now that Android 8 is here? 42

Apr

23

2018

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 ...

40 cent DIY pressure sensor based on a capacitive principle 25

Oct

20

2017

Lately I am spending a lot of time working on Fochica. Fochica is a system that alerts parents if they unknowingly leave a child in a car. The Fochica device is Arduino-based, installed in a vehicle and communicates with the parents’ smartphones via Bluetooth. Fochica is a finalist in the Hackaday Prize 2017 competition and ...

Fochica™ – Forgotten Child in Car Alert

Jun

20

2017

Over the last 12 months I have been working on an interesting project with an important mission: to prevent forgetting children in vehicles. Kids who are left alone in cars are likely to suffer a heat stroke, often with grave consequences. Naturally, this is a bigger concern in hot countries, such as Israel, where I ...

HM-10 or CC41-A module? Automatic Arduino BLE module identification 97

Dec

6

2016

Lately I am working a lot with Arduino, which is a new field for me, hence fewer posts. Arduino is a very popular entry level embedded electronics platform. My latest Arduino project features Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication. Arduino boards have no built-in BLE capabilities so I was looking to add a BLE module to ...

Arduino sound level meter and spectrum analyzer 330

Aug

27

2016

Recently I have been doing some projects with the Arduino electronics platform. One of the projects involved benchmarking certain motors and required me to measure noise levels. I will cover that project in more detail in one of the future articles, but now I would like to write about the process and best practices of ...

Understanding and improving VMware snapshot integration in FreeNAS 8

Mar

6

2016

Those who followed my previous posts know that I am using a storage server called FreeNAS in a VMware virtualization environment. There are several benefits of why one would use a storage server rather than just a trivial storage solution. Two of such major benefits are snapshots and replication. In this article I will discuss ...