Automation – One Project At A Time
Do you like the trend of remotes for appliances? I don’t. They often look our of place, require you to drill tiny holes in walls for mounts and even still, they can go missing. Let alone, they need batteries and you never can find them when you need them. But modern devices do more than … Read more
I am the kind of person who operates on data. I also like tools and want to maintain them well. For many of my small engines I use hour meters to provide me the data to indicate when to perform maintenance . I was looking for a project of late and thought, what could I … Read more
NVR (Network Video Recording) and false positives. Two words if you have been in this game long enough you will be familiar with. Tree’s that move, a spider all create noise to the point you tune out. Argh. I never have relied on the smarts of my Geovision camera’s but have used SightHound, Synology Surveillance … Read more
In October of 2023 Itead released their latest Sonoff Basic appliance module the Basic R4. It is now based off an ESP32 chip, versus the ESP82xx of prior models and provides increased load capabilities at 2400w. This appliance module is cheap and is perfect for attaching to a desk lamp, inline in a power board … Read more
Decisions, we all make them. You may make a decision based on specifications, performance, time to value supportability and so on. There are many dimensions, and we all have choice. In the last 15-20 years I have been an avid user of both SBC’s (Single Board Computers), PLC’s (Programable Logic Controllers) and MCU’s (Micro Controller … Read more
Automation and technology are amazing, modern advances allow us to automate almost everything in our daily lives, before we get into this post, here is an end-2-end example of this solution, enjoy. So now you know what we will be building, lets get in to it. There are almost no systems in my house that … Read more
Since having a PV (Photo Voltaic) solar array installed on my roof earlier in the year I have become a more aware of the energy consumption of my house. In my post ‘Making Data Driven Decisions With A PV Array, Home Assistant and MQTT‘ I am leveraging consumption data to make decisions in my house, … Read more
Technology is amazing and as much as we want to use our smart phones or ask Alexa, Google and Siri to take action, nothing beats a physical button. In almost all cases they are faster and it’s a good reason why I practice passive automation. Walk into a room and its dark, then the light … Read more
I have been on a journey to explore Azure IoT and push the thousands of events that flow through my local MQTT broker (Mosquitto) in to Azure IOT. From direct connection to Azure IOT-Hub (via MQTT and SAS tokens) through to Azure IOT-Edge running locally with MQTT. I have been able to achieve my goals … Read more
PLC based appliance modules have been something of a staple in my house over the last 10 years and at recent count, I had 72 X10 appliance modules. The challenges with X10 are pretty widely known but with the advances in X10, most of these challenges around reliability can be pretty easily solved. Adding in … Read more