15 months ago. This is when I started working on this project. The Solr digital wrist watch is a clock that won’t work without a battery but it will neither work without sun. Even more: the vintage display is really cool but...

Tindie is a great place to find uncommon electronic components or weird/interesting boards. I use to stroll around it’s products to basically see what’s new. It’s like Kickstarted but for real. One such uncommon and new electronic components is the...

Some weeks ago I talked about the Magic Home LED Controller as I was adding support for it in my ESPurna firmware. At the time a user pointed me to the H801 Led WiFi Controller by Huacanxing. The user in question...

I’m having some busy weeks again and the blog is suffering from my absence 🙂 I had a bunch of comments to accept (please remember all comments are being moderated). And even more projects pending (including a new version of the...

There are so many ways to tell the time. DIYers have been doing clocks since the Ancient Egypt (obelisks lacked portability, thou). Every modern maker has a clock amongst her first projects. I have done some myself, including a fibonacci...

Last February 7 I attended a workshop at a the SokoTech in Barcelona to assemble my own Fenderino, the coolest guitar ever (my knowledge about guitars is very limited, so take this sentence with a grain of salt). The guitar is...

After a busy month I decided to spend some energy on doing hardware instead of software and the result was the ESPurna board I posted about just yesterday. The goal was to have a device based on the ESP8266 I could fit...

If you have read me, you might know I have a firmware for ESP8266-based smart switches called ESPurna. The firmware integrates with Alexa, Domoticz, Home Assistant and about any other service that supports MQTT or HTTP REST APIs. It supports...

Following the bright path (sic) of the Ai-Thinker AiLight / Noduino OpenLight I wrote about a few weeks ago, now it’s turn for one of those devices you purchase but once they arrive they are stored in the TODO box...

A while ago I wrote about how to use PlatformIO with PunchThrough Lightblue Bean in a post here on how to use the new Bean Loader CLI from PlatformIO. Of course the reason for that was not merely being able to do...

Really busy these days. I have some drafts ongoing but I wanted to publish this short post right away. One of the readers of this blog, Michel Clavette, sent me these pics just yesterday. He bought 5 Ai Light bulbs...

Some weeks ago a tweet by Manolis Nikiforakis (@niki511) with the #ESP8266 hashtag drew my attention. Manolis had just received a “smart lamp” branded by Ai-Thinker, the AiLight. Yes, the same Ai-Thinker that has sold millions of ESP8266 based modules. Chances were...

One might think that one of the typical uses for a smart wireless switch (like Sonoff devices) is to be embedded behind a normal wall switch so it becomes a “smart” wall switch. It may seem obvious but it’s not that...

Sometimes Chinese manufacturers throw a mysterious, unlabelled, IC into their designs so we can spend a few hours trying to figure out what they are and what they do. It’s such fun! I’ve been playing with one of those this...

Lately I’ve been quite busy with the ESPurna firmware. It’s growing bigger and gaining some momentum. It’s really fulfilling to see other people using it and reporting back. But at the same time it’s very time consuming. Last Saturday I...

Last December Itead Studio updated their Home Automation product line with a new and different product. The main difference is that it doesn’t have a relay and it’s mainly sensors and no actuator (if we don’t define a notifying LED...

I’m working on a project were I have to build a network of battery powered sensors over a territory the size of a small town.The sensors will monitor power consumption, temperature and humidity in energy poor households. Often the families in...

Moving from the ESP8266 world I’ve been diving lately I still love the simplicity of battery powered Moteino nodes. You might know I’m migrating my XBee-based sensor network at home to an RFM69 one. So long I have changed my door...

  November was a busy month and the Sonoff Dual that IteadStudio kindly sent me to review was bored in a box waiting for some free time. But it was just fair that another board that has been waiting in...

My daughters love to talk to (or with) my Amazon Dot in their funny English: “Alexa, hello!”, “Alexa,  li-on!” (actually “light on”). It’s so easy to use it to switch on/off things at home using the fauxmo python script by Maker...

Some months ago I wrote about a hack I did to one of my Sonoff devices to be able to use a simple current sensor to monitor my washer machine process and alert me whenever my laundry was done. A...

The HLW8012 is single phase energy monitor chip by the chinese manufacturer HLW Technology. It features RMS current, RMS voltage sampling and RMS active power with an internal clock and a PWM interface in a SOP-8 package. You can buy it at...

A few week ago I had a really good time testing 4DSystems 4Duino-24 board. One of the things I noticed is that the Serial Command Set interface is really flexible. You can easily drive the display from an 8-bit microcontroller. But you...

A few weeks ago I wrote about my new door monitor. It was the first step towards migrating my XBee based wireless sensors network to RFM69 radios using Moteino platform by LowPowerLab. I was truly impressed by the low power...

Itead Studio keep on creating interesting products for the hacker community. A few weeks ago a new version of the already classic Sonoff TH came to life. This new version comes in two flavours: the Sonoff TH10 and TH16. In this...