home hacks

Amazon Echo Show

June 15, 2017 by 19 Comments

Back in May, Amazon announced the Echo Show, its new version of Alexa with a 7 inch touchscreen. The Echo Show is an interesting device, but will the great unwashed masses pony up $229 to buy the show? That’s $50 more than the original Echo, or $180 more than the Echo Dot. With 5.2 million units sold in 2016, Echo has been a resounding success. This has been in part due to Amazon’s open approach to the API. Anyone can build an Alexa compatible device using a Raspberry Pi. Google has (finally) followed suit with their Home device.

It’s not just the hardware that is accessible. Skills Kit, the programmer interface for extending Echo’s functionality, is also open. At CES this year, Alexa was the belle of the ball. Third party devices are being introduced from all corners, all of them connecting to Amazon’s cloud and responding to the “Alexa” keyword.

The Echo Show takes the family in a new direction. Adding a touch screen gives the user a window on the the world not available with voice interactions. Echo Show also includes a camera, which opens up a whole new set of privacy and security questions. Amazon touts it as a device for viewing security cameras, watching YouTube videos, and making video calls. This puts Echo Show dangerously close to the internet appliance category, essentially a barren wasteland littered with the corpses of previous devices. Does anyone remember when Palm tried this with the 3Com Ergo Audrey? How about the i-Opener? Will Alexa persevere and succeed where others have failed? A lot of it will depend on the third party developers, and how Amazon treats them.

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Ikea Tradfri Hacking

June 14, 2017 by 17 Comments

Smart lighting is all the rage right now. Sure, Phillips Hue is the giant player in the market, but there are plenty of ZigBee, Bluetooth, and WiFi light bulbs out there. Ikea–known for cheap furniture, meatballs, and waffles–is a recent addition to the field with their Tradfri system. Like most things from Ikea, they are effective and inexpensive. [Andreas] takes a Dremel to the controller and shows how to hack the system to use MQTT. You can check out the video below.

Once he had the device opened, the used the German Make magazine article we talked about earlier, to help understand what he had. Armed with the pinout, he was able to solder a wiring harness to the controller. He then connected a WeMos board. A little Arduino code later, and he was controlling the light with MQTT.

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Gas Heater Gets A Battery Backup

June 14, 2017 by 17 Comments

With the availability of cheap modules, it has become easy to hack/make stuff at home and home appliances see the most creative hacks of all. In one such hack, [Vadim] takes the DIY route to adding battery backup to his gas heater.

His existing unit operates on two D-type batteries which need to be replaced once they are depleted. [Vadim] wanted to implement a reversible method since he lives in a rented place. He replaced the original cells with battery adaptors and brought out the connections using two wires. He then proceeded to add two cellphone batteries with a TPS54233 regulator so as to supply the desired voltage to the gas heater. This is interesting since the module used is an official Texas Instruments EVM instead of the traditional eBay purchase.

The batteries in question are charged using modules based on the TP4056 which in turn are fed 5V from power supply modules. The DC voltage is coupled with a LM1117 to provide power to the heater from the mains and the switch over is accomplished using an SPDT relay. The enclosure is a humble box which resembles a plastic food container and is fitted with PG9 cable glands along with a fuse holder to boot. Take a look at the original post for a plethora of images and details of construction.

This an excellent example of a project that came together using available parts to solve a problem without the frills. The DIY fish feeder is another example of a project with functional design and is a great example of DIY.

ESP8266 MQTT Remote Gate Entry

June 4, 2017 by 31 Comments

Do you live in an area where you (or your car) are locked in by a gate? If so, you may know how [Alexander Else] feels about letting his guests in and out constantly with a remote control — it’s just not convenient. [Alexander] could have just purchased some extra remote controls and passed them out, but they aren’t exactly as cheap as party favors. Not to mention it wouldn’t make sense to hand one out to every single visitor anyway. Because the gate is a community gate, hacking the actual gate system was not an option. There was only one thing he could do — hack the remote control!

Like just about every other hacker, [Alexander] had a spare ESP8266-based board lying around. [Alexander] also had a couple of spare relays which he used to control the two buttons on his designated ‘sacrifice’ remote — one relay per button. After throwing these parts together with a couple of supporting bits of electronics, the hardware was done.  Now [Alexander] can just set up HTTP Request Shortcuts on each trusted visitor’s smartphone. From there on out they can open/close the gates themselves!

Originally, he was using IFTTT to trigger the string of events that make it all happen, but there was a delay of about 8 seconds (from trigger to relay action). [Alexander] was not having this so he turned to the HTTP Request Shortcuts app. When he made this change, the delay disappeared. Continue reading “ESP8266 MQTT Remote Gate Entry” →

Hijacking the Sonoff OTA Mechanism

May 31, 2017 by 25 Comments

ITEAD’s Sonoff line is a range of Internet-of-Things devices based around the ESP8266. This makes them popular for hacking due to their accessibility. Past projects have figured out how to reflash the Sonoff devices, but for [mirko], that wasn’t enough – it was time to reverse engineer the Sonoff Over-The-Air update protocol.

[mirko]’s motivation is simple enough – a desire for IoT devices that don’t need to phone home to the corporate mothership, combined with wanting to avoid the labor of cracking open every Sonoff device to reflash it with wires like a Neanderthal. The first step involved connecting the Sonoff device to WiFi and capturing the traffic. This quickly turned up an SSL connection to a remote URL. This was easily intercepted as the device doesn’t do any certificate validation – but a lack of security is sadly never a surprise on the Internet of Things.

After capturing the network traffic, [mirko] set about piecing together the protocol used to execute the OTA updates. After a basic handshake between client and server, the server can ask the client to take various actions – such as downloading an updated firmware image.  After determining the messaging format, [mirko] sought to create a webserver in Python to replicate this behaviour.

There are some pitfalls – firmware images need to be formatted slightly differently for OTA updates versus the usual serial upload method, as this process leaves the stock bootloader intact. There’s also the split-partition flash storage system to deal with, which [mirko] is still working on.

Nevertheless, it’s great to see hackers doing what they do best – taking control over hardware and software to serve their own purposes. To learn more, why not check out how to flash your Sonoff devices over serial? They’re just an ESP8266 inside, after all.

ESP32 Hamster Wheel Tracker Tweets Workout Stats

May 27, 2017 by 21 Comments

Even with all the hamster wheel trackers out there (and on this site) there’s room for improvement. [Bogdan] upgraded his hamster wheel from an Arduino and datalogging shield to an ESP32, and unleashed some new capabilities one does not ordinarily associate with hamster wheels.

[Bogdan]’s project logs distance in feet, duration of current session in time, RPM, overall revolutions, speed in MPH, and overall number of sessions, as well as a couple of system monitoring stats. It also tracks multiple wheels, as [Piontek] (the hamster) has two. However, thanks to the ESP32, [Bogdan]’s wheel tracker tweets its stats and updates a ThingSpeak dashboard with [Piontek]’s workouts.

In addition to its functionality, [Bogdan] made a point to make the project look and feel FINISHED. He designed custom 3D parts including a front plate, hooks for attaching the control box to the cage, and mounts for attaching the sensor to the wheel.

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Google Home Meets ESP8266

May 23, 2017 by 20 Comments

[Luc Volders] is building his own smart house with the help of Google Home and an ESP-8266. Inspired by the house computers from the TV show, Eureka [Luc] created an IoT ecosystem using a mix of off the shelf devices and open source software.

There are about a thousand ways to create a DIY smart home these days. All of them involve setting up a command receiver (like Amazon’s Echo or Google Home), some sort of cloud connection, and an end device controller. This can get complex for the beginner. [Luc’s] article is great because he walks is through each step tutorial style. He even keeps things simple by programming the ESP8266 using BASIC with ESP-BASIC.

[Luc] uses If This Then That (IFTT) as his cloud service. IFTT is the glue between Google’s cloud service and the ESP8266 connected to his home WiFi network. Speaking of which, [Luc] shows how to set up port forwarding on the router so all accesses to port 8085 go to the ESP8266. Not exactly strong security – but it’s better than opening the entire home network.

You don’t need a real Google home device for this hack. You can build your own with a Raspberry Pi. Once that is set up you can do everything from turning on lights to watering your lawn.

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