Thing that I’ve made and might be useful to others.
Intro I have used 2 types of LED torches: regulated and unregulated. The unregulated ones are the most common and they use some simple circuits for the LEDs, which means that as the battery discharges the light output gets lower. The regulated ones use some circuit to maintain a constant current flow as the battery discharges, for as much as possible. What about the Energizer hard case pro pivot plus? This is an odd one.… Continue reading
Intro Well there is no surprise: i went through a lot of temperature and humidity sensors. Some I already reported on, and some more i tried afterwards. And none seem to survive the exterior readout very well. The defects are mostly related to humidity, but not temperature. What happens when they fail: mostly the humidity saturates to 100%. Here is my most recently replaced one from outside, a BME280: After a while, the sensor reads… Continue reading
Intro I currently use aNikon Z5 camera. The Z5 is interesting in one aspect, it finally has USB charging using USB-PD. In my opinion, USB charging should have been present in all cameras since they started having a USB port, even if charging with the limited 2.5W will take a long time. But, nowhere in the manual or the specifications does Nikon say what parameters the USB PD charger is working at, so I decided… Continue reading
I finally got one! I wanted a new laptop around the end of 2019, but decided to wait till CES announcements to see if something nice was coming out. And I did really like the Asus G14. But the pandemic came, the G14 was nowhere available so I tried my luck with an MSI GS66 which I did not like and returned. Finally, in 2021 I managed to get a G14 2021 model and have… Continue reading
Intro I have quite a few strings of LEDs with clips for photos. Never thought it was much more than a gimmick when i got the first one, but they do make for nice and personal decor with the photos attached. So naturally the next step is to control them through the home automation system. The first one was easy, there were all LEDs in parallel and an ESP8266 module and a tranzistor was all… Continue reading
Intro Part of my home automation project I would have some controllable lights, of course. On one hand, I used quite a few LED strips, controlled by dimmer modules. On the other, current technology allows for a plethora of wireless light bulbs. Philips HUE is probably the biggest and best known because it has existed for quite a long time, but I am not that attracted due to the price. Once Ikea came up with… Continue reading
Intro When I saw this KL50 wifi light bulb on sale, I thought I want to grab one and see what is inside. A quick search revealed no details about the insides of filament WiFi light bulbs. Short review The light worked well from the start, discovering and connecting it through the WiFi was straight up. It does what it promises, quite a nice diffuse and rather warm light. I have slightly colder lights in… Continue reading
Intro Finding the proper box for my sensors is not easy. But even after finding one that mostly worked, I wanted to explore more sensors and still have a bit of freedom while doing that. Of course, that means 3D printing with the new 3D printer. There is just one problem …. 3D printed boxes take a long time to 3D print. An example Here is the newest sensor module I designed, which can fit… Continue reading
Intro In my first iteration of sensors I relied on wire connections between sensors and the actual node board. The result for a motion sensor and a temperature and humidity sensor looks like this The problem with that is that during sensor modules assembly run I spend quite a bit of time on the wiring. On top of that, the result is a mess of small wires inside a box. It makes it hard to… Continue reading
Check out part 2, where the basil is watered automatically. Intro Part of my home automation system is monitoring the well-being of various other non-human species around the house. So i started with the plants. Since they are mostly fixed creatures and generally require only water input from humans, monitoring the soil humidity is a good start. How There are quite a few ways to measure how much water is in the soil, some of… Continue reading