Monitoring Solar Consumption With A ESP32/8266 and LED Lights

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

Creating a Soft-Remote with MQTT and Home Assistant

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

Bridge Building – Mosquitto MQTT to Azure IOT Using Paho MQTT and the Azure IOT SDK’s

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

Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Dual R3 & Integrating With Home Assistant

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