How To Use Meross Smart Devices As Cheap Offline IoT

Updated on 10th Sep 2020 20:01 in DIY, Home Assistant, IoT, Smart, Tutorial

When it comes to smart devices, Meross has been my choice for multiple projects due to their excellent construction and very competitive prices. The biggest problem with these devices, as with many other readily available smart devices is that any commands you send will go over the internet, to some remote server, only to come back to your local network. Find out how I got these readily available devices to work without any internet connection using Home Assistant...

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How to Remember your Plant's Water with an ESP8266

Updated on 15th Sep 2020 14:21 in DIY, IoT, Smart

One of the things I have never been truly good at is remembering to do specific tasks that should ideally be done on a frequent basis. I recently received a plant as a gift and although it says it requires little attention I know that despite my best effort I will forget to water it regularly which will result in a sad plant. Luckily there is technology all around that can help me with this task. Here I use an ESP8622 to measure the humidity in the soil, allowing my Home Assistant instance to notify me when it drops below a certain amount. I first started by gathering the necessary materials...

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What is HiSLIP? And How to Emulate It

Updated on 31st Aug 2020 20:33 in General

Sometimes when developing software it becomes necessary to develop different software to simplify the creation of the real project. Here this software is used to allow development without the hardware that would usually be required using the High Speed LAN Instrument Protocol (HiSLIP). While developing software with the intent of running automated tests on hardware, it became an issue when said hardware was unavailable due to various reasons. I didn't want to have to stop working...

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Arduino DMX to RGBW LED with MAX485

Updated on 15th Sep 2020 14:24 in DIY, General

So here's a fun one: you have a DMX console and an entire system that runs using it. You just bought an awesome set of LED strips for super cheap from Amazon and of course, you want to use them in sync with the rest of the system. You could, of course, buy a DMX decoder but I wasn't able to find any decent ones for what I wanted...

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