Build materials ESP8266 12E Modules: 2$ at aliexpress TSL2561 Breakout board: 1$ at aliexpress SI7021 Breakout board: 2$ at aliexpress AtTiny85 DIP mcu: 1.3$ at aliexpress Here you can find the main components for my device. I only link to the search and show the picture of my device, because products/companies comes and goes. If […]
Author: Alex Jensen
ESP8266 on batteries for years – part 1
The ultra low power weather station For some time I have been fascinated by the possibilities of the ESP8266, but I never really considered it good for a life on batteries. I got an idea of making an outdoor weather station that would send measured light level, temperature and humidity to my home automation server. […]
Wifi Current/Voltage Datalogger
Problem to solve I have made a small ESP8266 based outdoor sensor that runs on batteries. I wanted to see how much power it uses when it powers up from sleep to help me do some calculations on battery lifetime. In my toolbox i found an INA219 breakout board that would help me do my […]
Intrusion Alert
Arduino Intrusion Detection / Honeypot I decided to make a small intrusion detection system for my network. It works like this: When powered up it displays it’s address (can be obtained via DHCP or set statically in the code) After 20 seconds it blanks the display and listens for incomming traffic to the device. If […]
Home Environment – Part 4
Server side Here I will try to roughtly explain the server side of the story. This is not a complete guide in setting up Home Assistant, Mosquitto and Grafana. That is way to extensive to cover here. But there is a lot of good guides out there. Homie The first time you start up […]
Home Environment – Part 3
ESP8266 master All communication via MQTT is handled by the brilliant library/framework called Homie. I am using version 2 which is extremely well documented. I let the ESP wake up, take it’s readings and then go to sleep for 2 minutes before the next reading. I have simplified the main sketch by making a generic […]
Home Environment – Part 2
Components used Most of my components were found cheap on AliExpress or on Ebay. It’s amazing what you can get for a few dollars, if you are ready to wait for 1-2 month for delivery 🙂 ESP8266 12E Module: Find at AliExpress Arduino pro mini: Find at AliExpress PPD42 Dust sensor: Find at AliExpress CCS811 […]
Home Environment – Part 1
The project For some time I have been working on gathering information about the indoor climate in our appartment. The project is nearly finished and it seems like a stable platform. Here is an example of the end result of all the data collection: If you want to get a feeling of what you […]
Arduino Smart Logging
The problem Often when programming in Arduino you need some logging to the serial port. Most often this is done with a lot of “Serial.println” statements. To make some nice output the logging code easily becomes quite big. Here is an example that illustrates the problem: #define NUMBER_OF_APPLES 100 uint8_t applesPerPerson = findApplesPerPerson( peopleAmount ); […]
Keeping state of Philips Hues in Appdaemon
Hues state in Appdaemon. Since I am using Appdaemon, it was obvious to rewrite my previous script to run in Appdaemon. The description of how it is working is also found in that blog entry. Here is the configuration that needs to be put in conf/appdaemon.yaml : HueStateKeeper: module: huestatekeeper class: HueStateKeeper bridge: 192.168.xxx.xxx lights: […]