Time to start putting together a drone. Thanks James for dropping off some parts!
Category: Vlog
Jon’s Walktime Blog #37: Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. And containers. Many, many containers
Not a proper SuperHouseTV episode: just another in my irregular series of vlog posts about day to day life in the SuperHouse.
Terminal Shield for the WeMos D1 Mini
Yet another shield for the D1 Mini! I laid out a bunch of them in a burst of sudden enthusiasm, so there are even more to come after this.
More info at its permanent page: www.superhouse.tv/d1mterminal
Shield outline for the WeMos D1 Mini
This is a simple shield outline designed to be used as a project skeleton for whatever you want to design.
All the details are at www.superhouse.tv/d1msho.
Prototyping shield for the WeMos D1 Mini
A very simple shield for the WeMos D1 Mini: the only thing that stops it being a simple grid of holes is that it has breakouts for the headers, and it includes the orientation notch to align it with the reset button on the Mini.
The permanent page for it is at www.superhouse.tv/d1mproto.
Power Shield for the WeMos D1 Mini
The WeMos D1 Mini is a fantastic little development board based on the ESP8266 microcontroller with WiFi. It’s super cheap, and there’s even support for it now in the Arduino IDE so you can program it easily. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out on the WeMos site.
One limitation is that it needs 5V USB power to run, which is a pain if you want to build it into a project that doesn’t have USB power easily available. I designed this shield to give the D1 Mini the ability to accept power from 7 to 14Vdc (up to 20Vdc in a pinch) via a 2.1mm DC jack or screw terminals.
I hope to turn this into a product soon: I just need some more parts to arrive. There’s a page for it now at www.superhouse.tv/d1mpower.
No dominant Open Source home automation projects?
If you’re just getting into home automation and go searching for Open Source HA projects, you’ll discover there aren’t any obviously dominant players – more a mix of partly-developed personal projects that aren’t very portable. Why is that?
Links for this ep:
- Allison Randal: www.twitter.com/allisonrandal
- Desktop Home Hacks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8asl5SsGy4
- Mister House: misterhouse.sourceforge.net
- Open Remote: www.openremote.org
Arduino light switches
As part of my SuperHouse home reno the entire house has been rewired, including replacing all the light switches with Freetronics Arduino-compatible control surfaces running on the LAN using Power-over-Ethernet. To save time assembling all the switches I designed a custom PCB for the control surface.
A look inside my switchboard
Have a look inside one of the switchboards in my house, where I’m linking Arduino-based home automation devices into the switchboard for software control of just about everything.
Water and electricity don’t mix
Early this year my family was flooded out of our house when water came through the ceiling during renovations, and we’ve been living in the recently built workshop at the back of the garage ever since. Well, last night the garage flooded as well. Oh joy. And to make it even more interesting, I learned a lesson never to leave running electrical equipment on the floor. Or to stand next to it, in water, while it’s running.