, If you’re a casual electronics hobbyist like me, the idea of using a LCD magnifier or microscope may seem attractive. For example this music spectrum display kit requires soldering 240 SMD LEDs, with each LED less than 1mm x 2mm in size. (It’s ridiculous yes but it’s no worse than doing jigsaws). A fancy magnifier can be replaced...
topics on this page: what do I eat? how does my weight change? do I get enough sleep? where did I go today? how does my body react to exercise? introducing Google Fit You just might have peeked at the phone app called Google Fit. It’s often already on a new phone. Without even a fitness band the app...
If you’re looking for a smartwatch, look at the Huawei Watch / Huawei Band 6 / Huawei Watch Fit New wearables If you’ve yet to get yourself a smartwatch I’ll have a guess at the reasons other than you don’t want one. One negative may be that Google Wear OS and Apple Watches have the battery life that just...
… I can now see my Huawei health data in Google Fit and Google Drive. The Health Sync app acts as a go-between, and connects Huawei health to several other apps or services. In 2022 Huawei had an impressive line of smartwatches and fitness bands at attractive prices. I succumbed to buy a Huawei smartwatch and was delighted that...
Why do this? At an early point on the journey to network heaven you may have a need to connect from some holiday location say, to a camera, your computer, a home automation setup or the router exactly as you normally do back at home. You may instead want to access a service such as Netflix which works well...
what do we mean by getting out of sync: Scenario one: You’ve two table lamps which are controlled independently either because they’re smart lamps or because you’ve two regular lamps controlled by two smart plugs/sockets. Scenario two: Smart light bulbs can be turned on or off by the manufacturer’s app, or by a switch, or by a timer or...
What’s going on? Hec, I’m in a room with robot arms and fingers twitching as they respond to social media. THIS can only be art but it’s art powered by makers. Tucked away is a spaghetti bowl of technology with Raspberry Pi Zeros as the thinking heart of it. For a first and maybe last time I’ve chosen to...
The Netgear Nighthawk r7000 is a router, switch and powerful Wi-fi access point in one unit and even in 2021, years on from when it was made it still offers your network a boost today. Changing the firmware to Tomato, as explained below, adds versatility to the power. I would only sell the R7000 if a mesh system or...
There are LED strip lights where every LED can be doing something different with the result that you can create peculiar effects. You can start with a commercially available kit but after a while you might branch out. For example I’ve attached a microphone to one of the LED controllers and that in turn controls the pulsing of the...
The Home Assistant home automation hub is more useful if you can access it remotely. In addition to having anywhere access with a browser URL, there’s an excellent phone app to access Home Assistant. A bit of nginx magic achieves this but the resulting benefits are not only great, the mobile app can access sensors (GPS; battery, status) in...
If you need to access Home Assistant remotely away from home, skip this page and instead go to access your Home Assistant remotely using DuckDNS, Letsencrypt and the nginx SSL proxy. This page is for those who want to access Home Assistant from outside the home, and also want to access other devices, a router, a camera or a...
Your smart bulbs, switches and door bell all come with a useful manufacturer’s app – over time you’ll accumulate many such apps. While Home Assistant might make them redundant, here are couple of tips for making use of these apps. My smart devices have an app and a login account for each of them. That’s a lot of clutter...
The digits at one end of a large LED clock displayed much more dimly than they ought. I’d say they were about half the brightness – and it was quite a puzzle. The clock was powered by a 5v USB charger and a cable with 5mm barrel plug. The solution appeared as I was dismantling the device to a)...
If you need to know when a device, like a dryer or washing machine has finished working, get a ‘smart plug with energy monitoring‘. Amazon list many of them but whichever brand you get, you’ll have more versatility if it can be integrated with your home automation platform. For example TP-link has the HS110 with energy monitoring and it...
This ceiling ‘coffer’ is lit by four 5m LED strips cut down to size fitted in 2017. If you wanted really, really bright light, these analogue white LED strips were the thing to get. At £8 for 5m at 150 LED/m and high lumens I could not complain. You might use digital, addressable and dimmable LED strips (eg WS2811) but...
If you use Home Assistant you can show temperature, time and other sensor entities on this cute display. The inspiration for this mini-project came from a need to display my oven temperature in a convenient place in the kitchen. I might instead need to see the time of the next train, the oil tank level, my broadband speed or...
Without copying a screenshot to or using a USB stick (no!) All the day I capture useful or interesting images from facebook, instagram, desktop apps and web pages. I copy bits of images to use in lectures, newsletters, web pages, emails and Whatsapp messages. I capture images to remember a membership number, an address or map, a booking reference,...
Ovens may have digital controllers or analogue temperature controllers and cooks seem to have blind faith in their settings. In this household the cooks were burning food so I checked the oven temperature. It was so inaccurate that I decided to fit a device to monitor its temperature. Background: The dial on my shiny Smeg oven not only set...
The measurements that I take around the home provide two things: – a picture of a moment in time – a room temperature for example. – how something changes over the course of a day – the electricity use graph below. But sometimes I want a bigger picture. For example, I also want to know how much electricity I...
A home automation platform, such as Home Assistant, allows you to make temperature v time graphs using sensors that you might place around the home. Monitoring temperatures allowed me to get my heating devices to turn on/off at optimal times. In a future post I’ll discuss how we might use data to be economical. You’ll have your own reasons...
