building a power outage alert notification:
We will build a device to notify us in case of a power outage in our home. For that we just need to re-purpose a GSM tracker.
Post-scriptum: do not waste any time on the Orange Pi 2G IoT.
While the idea and the hardware sound nice, after working a bit with it, there are just too many issues:
the official Linux distributions are old (> 1 year), the kernel is even older (it still is a 3.10)
the serial port is unstable (freeze on overrun)
the wifi is very unstable
the wifi MAC changes at every boot
the battery managment actually does not work at at all (no power and no charging due to a mistake in the design)
adding DCF77 time synchronisation to the LED clock:
By adding a DCF77 receiver to the LED clock presented in episode 16, the clock can automatically update the time (in Europe) in order to compensate for the RTC drift.
I've also used the opportunity to find out how the "analog" clock works.
my custom wireless electricity meter:
While renewing my distribution board the land lord decided to remove the electricity meter. Now I can't note how much electricity I am using. So I decided to build and install my own electricity meter: the spark counter.
Using a cheap power meter (i.e. peacefair PZEM-004), a microcontroller (i.e. Arduino Nano 3.0), radio transceivers (i.e. nordic nRF24L01+), a single board computer (i.e. Raspberry Pi), and some storage and visualization tools (i.e. influxDB and grafana) I am now able to measure, log, and monitor my electricity consumption.
warning: the electricity meter I am presenting will only work for 1 phase 2 wires power distribution systems. I have a 3 phases 4 wires system and I am doing it wrong.
MegaCode is a system provided by Linear LLC for controlling gates.
This time I looked a the receiver.
With my firmware it is possible to efficiently record the individual codes of other remote controls.
MegaCode is a system provided by Linear LLC for controlling gates.
Using software defined radio I could record and decode the radio transmission of the remote.
And thanks to my firmware this can be re-transmitted.
With it is is possible to clone MegaCode remote controls.