If you have curiosity and/or paranoia about what can be happening across your network there are tools which can gather information for you. This post will show how installed some tools to start to...
Moodle is a web-based platform where you can create learning activities, manage course assessment and pretty much run a school or sell courses. If your needs are small enough, you can use WordPress plugins...
This smoke alarm piqued my interest as a way to create an smoke/fire alert when I might be elsewhere. It’s unbranded and labelled as “C50D/W (1527, can skip code)” which is discouraging, but it...
the need for a (nicer) sub-domain: Your home network allows you access to ‘services’ such as an IP camera, the router, Home Assistant, a wi-fi access point, a NAS drive (eg Synology or QNAP)...
Time Machine is a backup utility on the Mac. This can work for years and then one day it doesn’t. If you need a file you had an hour ago, Time Machine gets it...
a tank level sensor that’s more useful than anything you can buy. This post shows my housing for a sensor that measures oil and water levels. The sensor is a VL53L0X time of flight...
make a heating oil tank level sensor that’s more useful than anything you can buy can measure oil level in any unit – litres, kWh, gallons or days until I need to refill the...
tips on choosing cameras and using POE / passive POE and waterproofing the connection. how do I record activity from cameras? Buying a security camera system isn’t just for professionals. A way forward is...
Let’s start with the reminder that an easy route to a security camera setup is to buy a kit with cameras and a system box to record events on site – you’ll find plenty...
handling data from experiments / home & garden / monitoring at home
by roger · Published Mar 2022 · Last modified Mar 2023
I know that I ought not leave things powered on. Knowing that is easier than remembering that an e-bike or drone or laptop battery is still connected. Below I show some ways to turn...
The very popular, but hardly-known Xiaomi nightlight, which lights up a dark space when you pass, now has a ‘smart’ version. A night light is nice on a dark stairway and toe-saving on a...
A ‘smart scale’ that records my weight to a phone might be seen as ‘gadgety’ and unnecessary but I’m now many months into this and think it’s fabulous. Almost fact: when you’re dieting, a...
GoPro, microphone and camera fittings are so ridiculously different, so here are some pointers to help buy the right bits to mount them. In all cases, even a GoPro (below) the device will have...
when you want an e-bike and you don’t want another bike:
, If you’re a casual electronics hobbyist like me, the idea of using a LCD magnifier or microscope may seem attractive. For example this music spectrum display kit requires soldering 240 SMD LEDs, with...
visitors this year: 519 topics on this page: what do I eat? how does my weight change? do I get enough sleep? where did I go today? how does my body react to exercise?...
visitors this year: 142 If you’re looking for a smartwatch, look at the Huawei Watch / Huawei Band 6 / Huawei Watch Fit New wearables If you’ve yet to get yourself a smartwatch I’ll...
visitors this year: 6,853 … I can now see my Huawei health data in Google Fit and Google Drive. The Health Sync app acts as a go-between, and connects Huawei health to several other...
visitors this year: 9,619 Why do this? At an early point on the journey to network heaven you may have a need to connect from some holiday location say, to a camera, your computer,...
visitors this year: 276 what do we mean by getting out of sync: Scenario one: You’ve two table lamps which are controlled independently either because they’re smart lamps or because you’ve two regular lamps...
visitors this year: 195 What’s going on? Hec, I’m in a room with robot arms and fingers twitching as they respond to social media. THIS can only be art but it’s art powered by...
visitors this year: 6,428 The Netgear Nighthawk r7000 is a router, switch and powerful Wi-fi access point in one unit and even in 2021, years on from when it was made it still offers...
visitors this year: 155 There are LED strip lights where every LED can be doing something different with the result that you can create peculiar effects. You can start with a commercially available kit...
visitors this year: 3,783 The Home Assistant home automation hub is more useful if you can access it remotely. In addition to having anywhere access with a browser URL, there’s an excellent phone app...
visitors this year: 12,282 If you need to access Home Assistant remotely away from home, skip this page and instead go to access your Home Assistant remotely using DuckDNS, Letsencrypt and the nginx SSL...
visitors this year: 179 Your smart bulbs, switches and door bell all come with a useful manufacturer’s app – over time you’ll accumulate many such apps. While Home Assistant might make them redundant, here...
visitors this year: 334 The digits at one end of a large LED clock displayed much more dimly than they ought. I’d say they were about half the brightness – and it was quite...
visitors this year: 471 If you need to know when a device, like a dryer or washing machine has finished working, get a ‘smart plug with energy monitoring‘. Amazon list many of them but...
visitors this year: 3,171 This ceiling ‘coffer’ is lit by four 5m LED strips cut down to size fitted in 2017. If you wanted really, really bright light, these analogue white LED strips were...
visitors this year: 3,258 If you use Home Assistant you can show temperature, time and other sensor entities on this cute display. The inspiration for this mini-project came from a need to display my...
visitors this year: 104 Without copying a screenshot to or using a USB stick (no!) All the day I capture useful or interesting images from facebook, instagram, desktop apps and web pages. I copy...
visitors this year: 673 Ovens may have digital controllers or analogue temperature controllers and cooks seem to have blind faith in their settings. In this household the cooks were burning food so I checked...
visitors this year: 1,533 The measurements that I take around the home provide two things: – a picture of a moment in time – a room temperature for example. – how something changes over...
visitors this year: 2,676 A home automation platform, such as Home Assistant, allows you to make temperature v time graphs using sensors that you might place around the home. Monitoring temperatures allowed me to...
visitors this year: 1,332 Yes. Below you’ll see how to control HomeEasy devices through Home Assistant and the RFlink receiver/transmitter. (This also controls other manufacturers’ wireless sockets). You’ll be able to create timers and...
visitors this year: 1,037 or how to selectively expose Home Assistant entities to Alexa with emulated hue Home automation platforms like Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant show major differences in the devices that...
visitors this year: 1,822 If you want to use a GitHub project with Arduino software follow this step-by-step guide. We’ll make an ESP32 camera web server using the Github code from ‘easytarget’. An ESP32-CAM...
visitors this year: 647 I discover my bicycle headlamp wasn’t working because some 18650 batteries have a button top. Oh my, that was embarrassing to admit The 18650 ‘battery’, like many batteries, is named...
visitors this year: 395 Here’s what to do when a restaurant asks you to scan a QR code for their track and trace (written in 2020). And here’s how to identify a plant, an...
visitors this year: 277 The need: you use a table light for watching TV and a main (wall) light at other times and you want a coffee table button to switch between one or...
visitors this year: 492 a 3-gang wall switch for your home automation – using eWelink, T4EU1C and Home Assistant I got to a point where I had plenty of ‘smart’ lights and gadgets but...
visitors this year: 13,460 a project to integrate inexpensive 433MHz RF devices with modern smart devices. We’ve brought all the instructions to get going with RFlink on one page. see also: 433MHz smarter letterbox...
visitors this year: 1,423 In a previous project I set up temperature sensors in my room and sent the data via Bluetooth to Home Assistant, the home automation platform. Home Assistant is software that...
visitors this year: 5,087 Toggling a light switch means that a press of the switch will turn the light off or on depending it what it was last doing. There is nothing clever about...
visitors this year: 1,122 I wouldn’t especially recommend the D-Link DCS-D150 motion sensor but it does have some features that had me buy it. Firstly it plugs into a wall socket above a worktop...
visitors this year: 642 If you could look inside an old replaceable laptop battery pack like this you’d find 4 or 6 cells. Usually the cells are 18mm diameter, 65mm long and are called...
visitors this year: 511 ‘Smart meters’ and metering devices usually measure the electricity used by the whole house*. However I prefer to pay attention to the electricity used by individual devices, such as a...
visitors this year: 4,452 In this project I control a Sonoff light switch using Home Assistant. You can do the same with other Sonoffs. The switch shown here is the T4EU1C wall plate switch....
visitors this year: 723 The regular way to switch a Sonoff relay is to use the official ewelink app. Other ways require you to ‘flash’ the Sonoff device with Tasmota or ESPHome software and...
visitors this year: 3,115 The Home Assistant dashboard (aka ‘Lovelace’) is very good at displaying live sensor data as well as historic sensor data. The display below shows a ‘just now’ reading of the...
visitors this year: 1,838 How to make inexpensive, ‘old’ technology, 433MHz devices work with today’s smart devices see also: 433MHz smarter letterbox RF sensors and receivers If you’ve used any of the following examples...
visitors this year: 137 smart sockets have uses. A smart socket adds a little cleverness to a table lamp or electric heater. The printer upstairs takes five minutes to warm up so switching it...
visitors this year: 1,968 How do I safely house an electronics project? Is there a better way to mount a ESP-CAM camera? I’d been looking for boxes in the wrong shop so I found...
visitors this year: 2,257 they work together but not everything is possible As an early adopter I’ve come to feel that Philips Hue lighting system gains more praise than it needs. Dozens of other...
visitors this year: 632 see also more about 433MHz devices The letterbox is five doors and fifty metres from my desk. The uncertainty of the post lady arriving in the afternoon means that I...
rogerfrost.com is a compendium of ideas for using technology with sciencey questions in mind. Started in 1995 to offer ideas to school science teachers, Roger Frost expanded the coverage to home automation, gadgets and sensors to monitor, or understand, what’s going on around us.
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Roger Frost has been writing since 1988 and this web includes his published articles about the use of the Internet; the work of scientists and how technology is useful at home or school.
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