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
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 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
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
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more