Smart systems, makers and technology
In my recent blog on Open Source Home Energy Management with Home Assistant I wrote about how Home Assistant helps you to monitor and optimize your own home energy consumption. Within this blog post I will show how an ESP32 Wifi enabled Siemens AMIS reader can be used to monitor the energy that your home […]
With the current war in Ukraine, energy prices surge to unbelievable heights. The European countries do rely on Russia’s cheap gas and oil for much too long a time. Even without the Russian war, it was pretty much clear for years that with the looming climate change there is no alternative as to completely switch […]
The widely popular ESP32 microcontroller board is a great choice for any hobbyist to build smart electronics and home automation sensors. The board’s powerful but low-cost design inspired millions of DIY enthusiasts and laid the ground for many great products, such as the Dynatrace DevOps UFO. Firmware software for ESP32 boards is mostly implemented by […]
You know that kind of public wlan hotspots at hotels, coffee shops or other businesses that offer wifi access but you need to accept their terms of service? The technique of offering a consensus Web page right when you initially connect to an open wifi is called a ‘captive portal’. A captive portal forces an […]
When ordering my Original Prusa MINI way back in April this year, midst the Corona crisis, I did not anticipate the 4 months of inpatient waiting time. Prusa Research stopped the shipping of 3D printers during the Corona crisis, to produce the urgently needed face shields for hospitals, which stands for Josef Prusa’s innovative personality. […]
Telegram is a great way to receive home assistant (HASS) smart home automation information directly pushed to your Android or iPhone. By creating your own Telegram bot you get a lot of flexibility on sending home automation messages or even images from your security cameras to your mobile phone. The first step of attaching a […]
As a dedicated Home Assistant user for years now, I came to write an ebook covering all the important topics around home automation and tinkering your own Esp32 based sensors and actuators. Home Assistant is Open Source, written in Python and a lively community maintains over 3000 custom made components that allow you to control […]
Over the last months, I became more and more addicted to Home Assistant (Hass.io) and MQTT low cost wireless sensors. I was already familiar with several home and industrial automation systems that all come with a certain hardware (and price) and build upon a completely proprietary software stack. So long story short, I was searching […]
On my last trip to San Francisco this year I visited the California Academy of Sciences where i was immediately fascinated by a tiny robot called Ozobot. Ozobot looks amazingly cute and is able to perform a lot of magic that ultimately teaches your kids how to program by using a visual programming language thats similar […]
MobileVNC offers a tiny footprint VNC server software solution for the different Siemens Simatic HMI touch panels. No matter if you operate a large fleet of Simatic HMI KTP400 Comfort Touch Panels that run on a ARM CPU processor or a Simatic HMI TP700 on x86 (486) Intel CPU, MobileVNC will offer good native performance. Since its […]