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
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
Automation and technology are amazing, but is automation in your mind the basics, such as lighting, you might ask Alexa or Google Assistant to turn on something. These are science experiments, purely because it involves an utterance, the magic in automation is when it ‘just’ works. No asking, just like Event Driven Architecture, it happens … 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
The right tool for the job can make any job enjoyable. I often get sense if happiness using quality tools that make a job easy and painfree. Tools change, I am not just talking in the physical world. Take example my world, cloud computing, look at cloud networking, how we architect connections in the cloud … Read more
Throughout my automation journey there is one thing I always strive for, that is full duplex communication. The ability to send a message, but also receive a message from a device. This need, often in many cases influences technology choices. Which TV will I buy? Why will I build an irrigation controller over buy? Automation … Read more
I have been always wanting to add a Solar PV array to my house and recently, it made sense and I purchased a modest (7.5kw) system for my house. It has been as much of an IT journey of integration and extracting value from disparate systems has it been of reducing my carbon footprint. When … 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