home hacks

1879 Articles

A Smart Switch Board For The ESP8266

April 17, 2017 by 20 Comments

With a plethora of IoT projects and inexpensive commercial smart light fittings and mains switches appearing, you might be forgiven for thinking that another offering in this crowded marketplace would be superfluous. But there is always room for improvement in any field, and in this particular one [Xose Pérez] has done just that with his Espurna board.

This board is a very well executed ESP8266 mains relay, with an on-board mains power supply and power monitoring. It was designed with his Espurna (“Spark” in Catalan) custom firmware in mind, which offers support for Alexa, Domoticz, Home Assistant and anything that supports MQTT or HTTP REST APIs.

Best of all, it’s a piece of open source hardware, so you can download everything you need from his GitHub repository to create your own. For the ultimate in convenience you can even order the PCB ready-made from OSH Park.

As a demonstration of the Espurna board in a real application, he’s produced a smart socket project neatly enclosed in a wall-wart style box with an inbuilt Euro style plug and socket.

We’ve featured [Xose]’s work several times before here at Hackaday, he’s something of an IoT wizard. Most recently there was his work with Alexa and the ESP8266, but before that was his MQTT LED array for his laundry monitor.

PassivDom: Mobile Homes For Millenials

April 14, 2017 by 79 Comments

In many parts of the world, living in a trailer has gained a social stigma. We’re talking about a rectangular building placed on three wheels and towed to your preferred plot of land. It’s going to take a lot to break that social stigma, but this is a pretty sweet attempt.

PassivDom is an off-grid home. It sidesteps the electrical grid as well as water and sewer service. It’s marketed as utilizing revolutionary breakthrough in wall insulation which they claim makes it very easy to heat and cool. In addition to this self-sustaining angle, it taps into the tiny home movement with a footprint of just 36 m2 (4 m by 9 m; about 118 390 ft2 or 13′ by 30′).

For this to make sense you really need to get the “Autonomous” model, the only one that is designed for “off-grid” living and comes with solar panels and battery storage plus water storage and purification. That’ll set you back 59,900 € (about $63,461 USD) but hey, it does come with “high quality minimalistic furniture” which the best way we can think of to serve Ikea nesting instinct without saying the brand name. Yep, this ticks all the “marketing to millennials” boxes. We’re kind of surprised it’s not doing crowdfunding.

So where’s the hack? Obviously this is a hard sell at 1,664 €/m2 ($538 $163/ft2). A project of this size and scope is well within the purview of a single, motivated hacker, and arguably a weekend project for a well-skilled team from a hackerspace. Tiny Houses started as a build-it yourself so that’s already solved. We’ve seen what it takes for hackers to add solar to their RVs, and experiments in home-built power walls. Water storage and purification is already solved and quite affordable at the home store.

Has anyone built their own off-grid tiny house? If so, let us know what went into it. If not, what are you waiting for?

Google Calendar Interface For Your Internet Of Lawns

April 13, 2017 by 8 Comments

If you live somewhere where summers are hot and dry, you can instantly tell which homes don’t have automatic sprinklers installed. Or they may have them installed, but like the blinking “12:00” on that VCR of yore, the owners may not have mastered the art of programming the controller. To be fair, the UI on most residential irrigation controllers is a bit wanting, which is the rationale behind letting Google Calendar tell your sprinklers when it’s time to water.

Granted, someone who is mystified by setting a digital clock is not likely to pull off [ClemRz]’s build. It’s still pretty simple stuff, though, centered around an ESP8266 as it is. And calling the result an “irrigation system” is a little bit of a stretch, given that it could only support a single zone with a solenoid valve harvested from a defunct sprinkler timer. But as a proof-of-concept, or to water a small area, it hits all the marks. The ESP8266 drives the latching solenoid valve through an H-bridge chip after reading your Google Calendar and looking for upcoming events to open or close the valve. The Google Script and the ESP8266 code default to failsafe so that a mistake doesn’t leave the valve open and run up your water bill or drain your well.

It’s easy to see how this can be expanded to control a multi-zone irrigation system and support a smartphone UI for instant control of the valves. Overrides based on weather forecasts would be a nice feature too. Or you could just read the soil moisture levels directly with backscatter sensors.

Hackaday Prize Entry: WiFi In Wall Switches

April 7, 2017 by 28 Comments

The Internet of Things and Home Automation are the next big thing, even though we’ve had X10 switches and controllers for forty years. Why the sudden interest in home automation? Cheap microcontrollers with WiFi, ZigBee, and Z-wave, apparently. For this Hackaday Prize entry, [Knudt] is building a WiFi switch, meant to be retrofitted into any Euro wall switch.

There are three parts of [Knudt]’s WiFi wall switch, each of them with different requirements. The top layer is the switch itself and a small OLED display. These switches are really two small capacitive switches, which means there’s no reason to go through the work of sourcing a proper mechanical switch. Good thinking, there. The second layer of this contraption is basically an ESP8266, providing all the logic for this wall switch. The bottom layer is a bit more interesting, housing the 110-230V input, with a Triac or relay. This is where the fun, burny stuff happens.

Right now, you can go down to your local home supply store and simply buy a device like this. History has shown that’s a terrible idea. With home automation cloud services shutting down and security vulnerabilities abound, a DIY or Open Source home automation project really is the best idea. That makes [Knudt]’s project a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The HackadayPrize2017 is Sponsored by:

Build Your Own In-Fridge Soda Fountain

April 6, 2017 by 88 Comments

Who doesn’t love an ice cold soda? Lots of people, probably. This one’s not for them. It’s for those of us that are tired of having to go through the arduous process of manually opening a bottle and pouring a drink. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have your own soda fountain at home? [Kedar Nimbalkar] thought so, and built a soda fountain that you can install right inside a fridge.

The system is based around using small pumps marketed as “6V DC air pumps” on Amazon. [Kedar] uses an indirect method of pumping the soda in this project. It’s a sad fact that it’s hard to find a cheap pump that’s safe to use with fluids for human consumption, and on top of that, many types of pump out there aren’t self-priming. This means the pump needs to be charged with fluid to work, which can make changing empty bottles a real pain.

Instead of pumping the fluid directly, the pumps instead push air into the top of the sealed soda bottles, which forces soda out of another tube in the bottle. This means that the pumps themselves don’t have direct contact with the soda which is a great design when working with stuff you’re going to put in your body. Following on from this careful design, the tubing selected is food safe. Unfortunately, even though the pumps don’t directly touch the soda itself, it’s highly unlikely the pumps chosen (designed for aquariums) are genuinely food-safe themselves.

When you’re building a beer funnel setup for Australia Day/4th of July/Other, using all manner of industrial or agricultural fittings may be a relatively low risk, as it’s a one-off exposure. But if you’re building a system handling products for human ingestion that you’re using on a regular basis, you really do want to make sure that the parts you use aren’t slowly poisoning you. There’s many ways this can happen — parts may corrode or react with substances in the food, plastics may outgas, or there may be lubricants in the parts that have toxic compounds in them. Just look what can happen if you drink wine out of a gun barrel — and that was from a single exposure!

Overall it’s a cool project, and one that would be especially fun and educational to do with children. Young humans are well known for their predilection towards sugary beverages, and have minds ready to be filled with knowledge about pumps, safe food handling practices, and of course, electronics. We also like [Kedar]’s use of commonly available materials, like a plastic food container for the enclosure. The project would be a great starter on your way to building a more complicated cocktail-mixing barbot. Video after the break.

We know peristaltic pumps are the go-to for safe liquid pumping. Anyone know a hacker friendly way of pumping air while ensuring all parts of the system are food safe? The most creative solution we’ve seen is to use breast pumps but it wasn’t ideal. Let us know your own tricks in the comments!

Continue reading “Build Your Own In-Fridge Soda Fountain” →

Hacked IoT Switch Gains I2C Super Powers

March 27, 2017 by 50 Comments

Economies of scale and mass production bring us tons of stuff for not much money. And sometimes, that stuff is hackable. Case in point: the $5 Sonoff WiFi Smart Switch has an ESP8266 inside but the firmware isn’t very flexible. The device is equipped with the bare minimum 1 MB of SPI flash memory. Even worse, it doesn’t have the I2C ports extra pins exposed so that you can’t just connect up your own sensors and make them much more than just a switch. But that’s why we have soldering irons, right?

Continue reading “Hacked IoT Switch Gains I2C Super Powers” →

Oscillating Fan Controller Used As Relay

March 26, 2017 by 10 Comments

The most brilliant hacks we see aren’t always the thousand-dollar, multi-year projects spanning every facet of engineering. Rather, the most ingenious projects are ones that take an everyday thing and use it in a simple but revolutionary way. By that measure, it’ll be hard to top [Robert]’s latest hack which uses the controller board from an everyday oscillating fan to build a three-way remote-controlled relay board.

Most oscillating fans have a speed selector switch. What that does might be somewhat different between different types of fan, but in general it will select either a smaller portion of the fan’s motor to energize or switch in a resistor which will have the same speed-lowering effect. [Robert]’s fan had little more than a triple-throw switch on the control board, so when he decided the fan wasn’t worth keeping anymore, he was able to re-purpose the control board into a general-use relay. As a bonus, the fan could be controlled by infrared, so he can also remote control whatever he decides to plug into his new piece of equipment.

While this simple hack might not change the world, it may give anyone with an old fan some ideas for other uses for its parts. If you want to do a little more work and get the fan itself running again, though, it is possible to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up as well.