visitors this year: 697 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...
visitors this year: 315 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...
visitors this year: 827 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...
visitors this year: 2,709 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...
handling data from experiments / home & garden / monitoring at home
by roger · Published Mar 2022 · Last modified Mar 2023
visitors this year: 797 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...
visitors this year: 1,177 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...
visitors this year: 9,617 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: 275 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: 3,782 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: 12,281 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: 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: 3,170 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: 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: 2,675 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: 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: 13,459 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: 1,121 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: 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: 1,837 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: 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...
visitors this year: 83 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: 234 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: 302 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...
visitors this year: 733 … and see how to add features to the Home Assistant display An interest in solar energy is a possible reason to record the sun’s azimuth and the time of...
visitors this year: 1,076 The Google nest thermostat (or its Hive equivalent) are devices which I’d be happy to pay for and recommend. I could easily make something that turned on the heating with...
visitors this year: 862 what’s needed to start using ESPhome? option 1: an ESP32 development board with a micro-USB socket option 2: an ESP8266 development board – less power use, but no Bluetooth option...
visitors this year: 7,326 Home Assistant is software that connects smart devices. It enables them to have a useful life outside of the app that they come with. You will gain unusual flexibility where...
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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