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 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 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!
AWS held an IoT Contest July 13-17 2017, and this describes my entry (which won! Woohoo!). You can see a video description of this project here. You can also see the page on hackster.io here. This project provides integration between Home Assistant, AWS IoT, and low power devices running on the ESP8266. Â The ESP8266 has… Continue Reading AWS IoT Contest
I have a few old DNS-323 that I picked up for cheap. Although they are around 10 years old (as of 2016), thanks to some community firmware, they support drives larger than 2Tb. They’re not fast, but as a remote backup target they’re an excellent choice, since they can do OpenVPN, as well as rsync. One major limitation… Continue Reading DNS-323 Autostart after Power Failure
Tl;Dr: You can use these cheap Wifi RGB Modules from AliExpress/Ebay, and with a custom firmware they will speak MQTT and can be updated OTA as well as used for other features as desired. Download a copy of my custom firmware here, connect with the programming pads in the diagram here, configure Arduino to flash to… Continue Reading Hacked ESP8266 RGB LED Controller
Amazon in the US has a deal, where you can get a small button for $5. The marketing behind the button is, you can press it and it connects to amazon, and orders you a new package of something you have pre-selected. As a geek, all I see is a gadget that is simple, has a… Continue Reading Amazon Dash + OpenHAB for mail delivery notifications
A quick little thing I did as a weekend project was to connect our washing machine to the Internet. The washing machine is in the basement, three flights below our apartment. On laundry day, we occasionally try to rotate loads too early and end up going downstairs before the previous load is done. The washing… Continue Reading ESP8266 Internet Enabled Washing Machine
November 11 is the beginning of the Karneval Season, and on November 11 I was out with my wife enjoying the partying. I noticed a number of costumes with lights on them, but I was very disappointed in them. They were usually nothing more than a string of Christmas lights wrapped around a body or… Continue Reading Costume