Home Automation

December 17, 2021

RockARM – Hardware Build

Welcome back! If you’ve been following along in my RockARM series, and already 3D printed your RockARM case, then it’s time to fill it with some delicious hardware! In the video below, I take you through the hardware components and assembly, tools and tricks for getting everything built up nicely. After...

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May 25, 2021

ESPHome Wake from Deep-Sleep with MQTT

Welcome back! In this episode, I’m taking you through how to manage your deep-sleep mode battery-powered IoT sensors remotely, using MQTT retain flags. This lets you catch the device at its’ next wakeup interval and keep it online, so you can do a firmware update, then put it back in its’...

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May 7, 2021

Solar-Powered IoT project: Firmware flash

Let’s get some ESPHome firmware flashed on to your ESP32 solar-powered IoT project! I’ll show you the basics of building the base firmware to get it attached to your WiFi network, some tips and tricks for working with mDNS across subnets, and leave you with a working OTA-managable solar-powered sensor! Code...

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May 3, 2021

Containerized MQTT Broker

Here we’re going over the deploy and config of a containerized MQTT Broker, all the basics of pub/sub, topics, retain flags, and I’ll even show you how to dig in under the hood of a Docker volume. Check out the video below, and code samples discussed in the video are here...

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April 27, 2021

Solar powered ESP32 IoT sensor

In this video, we built a solar-powered, 18650 battery-backed ESP32-powered sensor, sitting in a compact 3D printed housing. This is using a temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensor, known as the BME280, which runs on the i2c bus. Additionally, we’re using a TP4056 charge controller, the updated version with low-voltage protection!

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