My adventures of Home Automation and other tech toys.
This post is a follow on from my previous post about using ESP Easy on a Wemos D1 Mini to create an IR blaster. The hardware side of things is exactly the same so head on over that post if you need more info on the hardware side first. What we are creating here is an IR blaster using a Wemos D1 Mini that connects to Home Assistant via MQTT so we are assuming you have these set up as well. Continue reading “Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using Tasmota”
A quick post to show off one of my first 3D print designs that may be useful to others. I run octoprint on a Raspberry Pi which is a cool project that also allows for the official raspberry pi camera to be added to the octoprint interface. My Raspberry Pi uses the official case but I didn’t want to hack a cable hole in the official lid in case I re-purpose the Pi for something else later on, so I made this replacement. It’s a pretty simple flat lid with 4 clips in each corner. Printed in PLA, the clips are a tight fit to provide some flex to the top so it contours to the slight convex nature of the official pi case. Continue reading “3D printed lid with a camera cable hole for the official Raspberry Pi Case”
Got a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant and would like to add some cheap temperature sensors to it? Well it’s pretty easy to do via several methods, Today we will focus on sensors directly connected to the pi. The below I used with Hass.io, but the same code should be usable on other versions of Home Assistant.
Continue reading “Adding Temp Sensors to a Raspberry pi with Hass.io”
After flashing a Wemos D1 Mini with Tasmota I have always found connecting to Tasmota for the first time a bit flaky. So I thought I would share the full process that I use to get the device on my network easily. Continue reading “Flashing the D1 mini with Tasmota the easy way”
Background
As I slowly add more smart devices to my house I keep finding the need to add some smarts to some of my older stuff. My 10 year old Samsung TV is one such device that occasionally doesn’t turn off when you hit the button on the front, so if I could automate an off command via an IR blaster when I leave the house or go to bed I would save a bit of power.
You may have seen this cute toy dancing robot on youtube recently, He goes by various names that have evolved from various open source projects. When a friend gave me the challenge to build him one we picked the Otto version from www.ottodiy.com but with the Otto kit purchased from banggood due to free shipping cost and a better AU exchange rate.
When I first started automating stuff around my house, Notifications from my washer and dryer were high on the list of things to do. I created a notifier for my washer using a wemos D1 mini and IFTT (project can be found here) as one of my first projects. It was a lot of messing around but it was cheap and has worked well for some time. I needed to find a different solution for my dryer as it had no running led that I could use to passively get the status from. After a lot of messing around with a vibration sensor I gave up when I saw a TP-link HS110 smart plug on sale.
The background of this project is that the speedo gear in my Ford KA wore out and that would mean swapping in the spare gearbox I had, and a lot of greasy work. It sounded like not a fun job, but coding up a wemos D1 mini to read a GPS module to display speed did sound like a bit more fun than a gearbox swap. So It was off to ebay to invest in a GPS board to connect to the wemos D1 mini and OLED display I had lying around.
Use the small, easily programmed and powered Wemos D1 Mini to turn your washing machine into a smart appliance.
