featuring the blog where you learn from my mistakes…
I recently started playing with Grafana as a dashboard to keep an eye on my local network of IOT devices, and it’s turned out to be very useful on more than one occasion so far.
Continue reading “IOT Monitoring with Grafana”
Ever since I put a mailbox out on my front gate, I have to check it manually to see if the postman has delivered any mail. That involves getting out of my car on the way in or out, or (ugh) walking all the way out to the post box! So, I’ve now installed a Raspberry Pi by the post box to send a text whenever something is put in the post box!
Continue reading “Mail-Pi – Raspberry Pi Post Box SMS Notifier”
Over a year ago I did an article about a DIY alarm system I’d build based on Raspberry Pi’s. I’ve recently done an update, and this time I’ve cleaned up the code and released it onto GitHub. It’s based on Node-Red and Python.
Continue reading “AlarmPi – Raspberry Pi Security Alarm Pt.2”
I decided a few months ago to cut the cord and get rid of my Sky TV subscription. Between a combination of purchasing and returning a Saorview Connect box, and trying out various front ends, here’s the end-result, and I’m delighted with it. Continue reading “New TV Distribution System (No More Sky)”
I’ve been toying a lot recently with LoRaWAN networking, even going so far as to build a full gateway and mounting it on my house. As an alternative, I ordered some GSM shields from AliExpress which connect into your existing GSM providers network. It saves building a gateway, although the running costs will probably be higher.
Continue reading “Get your IOT Project onto the Cellular Network for ~$10”
A few months back I built a full LoRaWAN gateway node for The Things network, and now I’m finally getting around to writing it up. I’d recommend this project to anyone interested in IOT, as it’s very edudational, and you’ll be helping expand the LoRaWAN network coverage in your area. In this build, I use a Raspberry Pi, a RAK831 8-channel gateway and an adapter board (also from RAK) that allows the RAK board to be mounted easily on the Pi.
IN October 2015, we had the launch event for the “Lightning Dress”, a garment we’ve been working on as a group in the local Fablab for the last 6 months. It’s got approx. 700 RGB leds, all individually addressable, so it gives great flexibility for generating interesting patterns and effects.
Continue reading “Lightning Dress”
Over the last while I’ve been having a problem with excess humidity in the shower rooms. Imagine that, the builder never put in extractor fans when the house was built! Anyway, I could put in those fancy extractor fans with the built in timers or humidity sensors, but I decided to do things the more interesting way, by using a small computer to read the values from a humidity sensor in each room, and based on the readings, turn on the fan until the humidity was reduced to an acceptable level.
Continue reading “Damp-Pi – Room Moisture Extraction with Raspberry Pi”
I got myself a new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B this morning. I was intrigued by its quad-core cpu and how it would stack up against the other single board computers that I’ve benchmarked in the past, which were:
I recently got a MIPS Creator CI20 from the guys at Imagination to play with. So here’s a quick of my first impressions, including a few benchmarks with sysbench. Performance overall was quite good compared to a Raspberry Pi 1 model B+, and even was pretty good compared to an Intel Edison on the CPU benchmark. Continue reading “Creator CI20 Benchmarked”