Sean's projects, musings and general information
When we bought our house, one of the criteria was a photovoltaic system on the roof. In 2018, we finally found our dream home, with a flat roof with no shade — it was perfect! In this series of posts, I will describe the design and installation of our system. It is a 9.4kW system… Continue Reading Solar System – Electrical Design
When we bought our house, one of the criteria was a photovoltaic system on the roof. In 2018, we finally found our dream home, with a flat roof with no shade — it was perfect! In this series of posts, I will describe the design and installation of our system. It is a 9.4kW system… Continue Reading Solar System – Design
As of version 0.80 of Home assistant, there is a new web hook trigger for automations. I already setup the Git Pull add-on to automatically pull the latest config from my gitlab. However, when I’m building stuff, my workflow goes like this: Add + test new gadgets to home assistant on my laptop Commit +… Continue Reading Home Assistant, Git Plugin and Web Hooks
As a part of my home automation, I want to collect data on our Power, Gas and water usage. I already covered the power usage in a previous post, so this will describe my setup to monitor our water usage. Fortunately, our gas meter (Pipersberg G4 RF1 c) and water meter (Sensus 620) both have… Continue Reading ESP8266 + Gas / Water monitoring
I recently purchased an Eastron SDM630 power meter and a Modbus TCP Gateway. This is a smart meter, which is installed behind my power company’s meter (since this can’t be changed or touched). The meter itself is about 130€ and can be found on Amazon. I opted for the Ebay one linked above, since it… Continue Reading Home Assistant & whole-home power monitoring
I order a lot of electronics from China. It’s not a problem, I’m just in denial. In a previous post, I described how I linked our mailbox up with Home Assistant (at that time, it was OpenHAB but the connections are the same), so I could be notified when we get mail. We recently bought… Continue Reading Home automation: Doorbells!
This is the third part in my series of scraping data from the local police department, to gather crime statistics over time. Part 1 covers the collection of the images Part 2 covers the finding of the pins on the image Part 3 (This part) will cover determining where the pins are geographically located Part… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 3
This is part two in my quest to determine the long-term crime statistics, in the city where I intend to buy a house. Click here for part one, where I collect the images weekly from the police’s site. In this step, I’ll pick the images out of the S3 bucket, and attempt to find all the… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 2
I want to buy a house in a nice neighbourhood. My local police department provides statistics, but they only offer a static image with the weekly break-ins superimposed on a map. I contacted them to see if they could provide the raw data used to produce their map. They said that this is not something… Continue Reading Using Python, OpenCV and AWS Lambda to gather crime statistics – Part 1
A central actor in my home automation system is a Smart Node. These small nodes can: Detect motion Sense temperature & humidity Indicate status with an RGB LED IR Receiver (not yet implemented in software) Parts List To build the Smart Node, you will need the following Wemos D1 Mini, or NodeMCU (Any ESP8266-based breakout… Continue Reading Home Automation Smart Node