visitors this year: 677 two meanings of getting out of sync: Scenario one: You’ve two independently controlled table lamps which you’d prefer to turn on or off together. The lamps could be smart lamps...
visitors this year: 364 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: 10,323 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: 360 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: 6,451 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: 20,162 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: 308 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: 1,437 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: 908 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: 8,415 This ceiling ‘coffer’ is lit by four 5m LED strips – each is cut to fit the space. When my kitchen lights turn on they fade up in a few...
visitors this year: 4,128 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: 259 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: 1,245 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: 2,281 My other page tells how much heating oil the boiler uses. Here’s how I collect and display energy use measurements around the home. My measurements provide two things – a...
visitors this year: 6,306 A home automation platform, such as Home Assistant, allows you to monitor temperature on graphs using sensors placed around the home. Monitoring temperatures allowed me to turn on/off my heating...
visitors this year: 2,490 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: 1,655 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: 3,185 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: 2,347 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: 726 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: 518 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: 852 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: 37,262 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: 1,913 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: 7,862 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: 1,617 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: 1,264 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: 816 ‘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: 6,257 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: 1,207 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: 5,049 1. Get IFTTT to put the data I send into a Google sheet Go to IFTTT, sign in and add the Webhooks service and the Google Sheets service. Follow this...
visitors this year: 2,897 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: 274 smart sockets have uses. A smart socket adds a little cleverness to a table lamp or electric heater. They connect to your Internet wifi though some work on local 433MHz...
visitors this year: 3,840 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: 3,440 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: 1,276 see also more about 433MHz devices The letterbox is five doors and fifty metres from my desk. The uncertainty of the postie arriving in the afternoon means that I make...
visitors this year: 110 This quick post is for anybody wondering how much money they need to put aside for energy. If you don’t use electricity for keeping warm, your summer and winter electricity...
visitors this year: 163 smart bulbs and sockets have select uses. A smart socket adds a little on/off cleverness to a table lamp, electric heater or the printer upstairs that takes five minutes before...
visitors this year: 471 When you look for home automation equipment you find many systems. They turn on lights and plug sockets; water the garden; unlock a door, turn up the heating; record a...
visitors this year: 617 In the beginning there was the smart bulb that changed colour and convinced me that here was something trivial and fanciful. Today I’m surprised by the usefulness of the smart...