Tech Diary

Sonoff, ESP8266 and Tasmota, how are these 3 components related? This can be viewed as a computer where Sonoff is the computer, ESP8266 is the CPU and Tasmota is the Operating System. Sonoff  is one of many companies in China which manufactures smart home WIFI connected devices such as switches, plugs and lights. Their devices are very popular among DIY smart home builders because they make it convenient to flash custom firmware. I have bought a few of such devices,  Basic Switch ,  RF-Wifi Switch ,  Wall socket  and  Light Switch . This can be easily found on Aliexpress, Taobao and Banggood, Videos and articles on how to modify to custom firmware can be found on Youtube. ESP8266 is one of the amazing makers modules that come out after Arduino. Espressif has make the ESP Microcontroller programmable using the Arduino IDE. The library has the entire TCP stack built in making it possible to be programmed as a mini web server, tcp/udp server/client. There ...

Next, I need a Micro P rocessing Unit (MPU), Micro-controller (MCU) and the software. After some design considerations, I have decided the brain of my system shall be a Raspberry PI. Raspberry is easily available. I have purchased mine at Taobao for less than S$70. It comes with a casing, power supply, 3xheat sinks, fan and a 16GB micro SD. This is the cheapest I can find. There are so many documentations, videos and websites on Raspberry Pi.  I watched a youtube clip showing Google Home assistant can be easily installed on a Pi. That sealed my decision to choose Raspberry Pi.  The next piece shall be the automation software, Currently, the most popular Home Automation control software are Openhab and HomeAssistant. I do not have time to evaluate both and settled for Openhab as I am more of a Java programmer. In case anything that needs debugging, it will be easier for me (but it turned out that I do not really need to look at the code). I like the Arduino ...

For this article, I am writing about the 3 sites where I have purchased most of the Home Automation project parts. Online shopping for China goods in Singapore is a wonderful experience. The parcel delivery services here are reliable and reasonably fast. So far I have not encountered a single package lost. My main consideration for online shopping is the ability to pay with maximum convenience, minimum fee and delivery to your doorstep. Taobao Taobao is the de facto shopping for those people in living China. In the early days, for those staying outside China, the only way to buy from Taobao was to go through agents who ordered the products on your behalf and charge a fee. Taobao recently announced a tie-up with Lazada (an online shopping portal bought over by Alibaba). Most of the fanfare is Lazada provides a Taobao link in Lazada portal . Actually, the main benefit is that I can order from Taobao main site and send over to Singapore via Lazada. Although in Taob...

Version 1 of my smart home design. My house has 4 rooms, 1 living room, a kitchen and a balcony. Project room is actually a converted storeroom/toilet to become my work area for future 3D printing and electronic projects. Let's break down the materials needed, Phase 1 Smart Switches - 3 Smart lights - 8 Raspberry PI - 1 Phase 2 Temperature Sensors - 8 Aircon Controllers - 5 (To be designed together with the temperature sensors) Smart Lock - 1 Not Planned WIFI Cameras - 2 TV controller box - 1 Google Home - 1 Remote Control Bind - 3 Auto Watering setup - 1 Looks like I have quite a bit of work to do.

My family is moving to a new home soon. I was thinking of setting up a smart home system for my new home. After looking at some of the commercially available solutions, either they are very expensive or I do not trust their security, so I decided to assemble and build one myself. In order to make the smart home modular and can cater for expansion, I have decided on the following considerations and design parameters when building up the smart home. The hub software has to be Open Source. The switches, lights and sensors can be either open source hardware or the devices must be using 1 of the open IoT protocols such as MQTT, CoAP RestAPI. Open and easily available SoC (System on Chips) hardware such as Raspberry Pi.  Open and easily available software/hardware based on common IoT development platform e.g Arduino or PlatformIO.  The ability to integrate to smart devices such as Google Home Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Homebridge. Ha ha,😂😂 this sounds like I am g...

IoT and Cloud Integration IoT, Cloud, 3D printing, Artificial Intelligent, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics are all the current (at the date of this blogpst) hottest and interesting technology. In IoT, big players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have make tools readily available to us to integrate many of these "Edge" devices to their platform. Recently I bought some of these devices to experiment the capabilities and was amazed at how cheap and powerful. So much for writing and let's get on with the projects.