Flashing Sonoff Devices With Tasmota Gets Easier

February 25, 2020 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

Tasmota is an alternative firmware for ESP boards that provides a wealth of handy features, and [Mat] has written up a guide to flashing with far greater ease by using Tasmotizer. Among other things, it makes it simple to return your ESP-based devices, like various Sonoff offerings, to factory settings, so hack away!

Tasmotizer is a front end that also makes common tasks like backing up existing firmware and setting configuration options like, WiFi credentials, effortless. Of course, one can’t really discuss Tasmotizer without bringing up Tasmota, the alternative firmware for a variety of ESP-based devices, so they should be considered together.

Hacks based on Sonoff devices are popular home automation projects, and [Mat] has also written all about what it was like to convert an old-style theromostat into a NEST-like device for about $5 by using Tasmota. A video on using Tasmotizer is embedded below, so give it a watch to get a head start on using it to hack some Sonoff devices.

Continue reading “Flashing Sonoff Devices With Tasmota Gets Easier” →

NFC For Your Home Automation

January 30, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 26 Comments

If home automation in the IoT era has taught us anything, it is that no one wants to run wires. Many of us rent, so new cabling is not even an option, even if we wanted to go that route. If you want a unique sensor, you have to build your own, and [tmkThings] wanted an NFC scanner at his front door. Just like arriving at work, he scans his credentials, and the door unlocks automagically.

Inside a little white box, we find an ESP8266 speaking Wifi attached to a PN532 talking NFC, and both are familiar names on these pages. The code, which is available on GitHub, links up with IFTTT and MQTT. For the security-minded, we won’t see this on your front door, but you can trigger your imagination’s limit of events from playing your favorite jams at the end of the day to powering down all the televisions at bedtime.

NFC hacks are great because they are instantly recognizable and readers are inexpensive, but deadbolt hacking is delightful in our books.

Continue reading “NFC For Your Home Automation” →

An Eight-Day Home Automation Hackathon Is Inspiration For Getting More Projects Done

January 24, 2020 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

There’s nothing quite like a deadline to cut through extras and get right at the heart of the problem. Maybe we should all follow Interpreet’s example and stop thinking about automating our homes and just make it in an eight-day hackathon. His talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference covers the zero-to-deployment home automation build he finished in the eight days leading up to his move from one continent to another.

Hackaday’s very own Inderpreet Singh found himself pulling up roots and moving from his home in India to teach at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada. He needed a way to keep an eye on his home from afar and the name of the game is IoT. When the only choice is “whatever works right now”, you can learn a lot about simple solutions.

He chose familiar hardware to work with, with the ESP8266 making up the bulk of the nodes and a Raspberry Pi as as a central hub for the setup. He chose to communicate between all the nodes on his system using WiFi because the hardware is robust and available. With security in mind, he keeps the automation system separate from the daily use WiFi system by grabbing an extra access point to serve as the automation network. The Raspberry Pi serves as a router of sorts; its Ethernet port is connected to the IoT device’s AP, while the onboard WiFi is used to connect to the home’s main AP for a connection to the wider Internet.

Software for the system is built on a REST API served by a Python Flask app. Many would advocate for using MQTT but Inderpreet’s testing with that protocol came up short as the broker he intended to use was no longer available. One of the interesting parts of his system design is that all nodes will check in at regular intervals; this allows them to inquire about actions they need to take, but it also allows the system to detect a malfunctioning node immediately. I’ve seen a similar trick used by Elliot Williams where he assigns a “ping” topic to all MQTT devices that causes them to report in with their IP address. Having a system to query and ensure the health of every node is a big tip to take away from this talk.

Continue reading “An Eight-Day Home Automation Hackathon Is Inspiration For Getting More Projects Done” →

Reverse Engineering Yokis Home Automation Devices

January 21, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the companies that are trying to break into the home automation market. Whether they’re rebrands of somebody else’s product or completely new creations, it seems like every company has at least a few “smart” gadgets for you to choose from. We hadn’t heard of the Yokis devices that [Nicolas Maupu] has been working on before today, but thanks to his efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, we think they might become more popular with the hacking crowd.

Even if you don’t have a Yokis MTV500ER dimmer or MTR2000ER switch of your own, we think the detailed account of how [Nicolas] figured out how to talk to these devices is worth a read. His first step was to connect his oscilloscope directly to the SPI lines on the remote to see what it was sending out. With an idea of what he was looking for, he then used an nRF24L01+ radio connected to an ESP8266 to pull packets out of the air so he could analyze their structure. This might seem like a very specialized process, but in reality most of the techniques demonstrated could be applicable for any unknown communications protocol of which you’ve got a hex dump.

On the other hand, if you do have some of these devices (or plan to get them), then the software [Nicolas] has put together looks very compelling. Essentially it’s an interactive firmware for the ESP8266 that allows it to serve as a bridge between the proprietary Yokis wireless protocol and a standard MQTT home automation system. When the microcontroller is connected to the computer you get a basic terminal interface that allows you to scan and pair for devices as well as toggle them on and off.

This bridge could be used to allow controlling your Yokis hardware with a custom handheld remote, or you could follow the example of our very own [Mike Szczys], and pull everything together with a bit of Node-RED.

Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT)

January 15, 2020 by Mike Szczys 54 Comments

For years we’ve seen a trickle of really interesting home automation projects that use the Node-RED package. Each time, the hackers behind these projects have raved about Node-RED and now I’ve joined those ranks as well.

This graphic-based coding platform lets you quickly put together useful operations and graphic user interfaces (GUIs), whether you’re the freshest greenhorn or a seasoned veteran. You can use it to switch your internet-connected lights on schedule, or at the touch of a button through a web-app available to any device on your home network. You can use it as an information dashboard for the weather forecast, latest Hackaday articles, bus schedules, or all of them at once. At a glance it abstracts away the complexity of writing Javascript, while also making it simple to dive under hood and use your 1337 haxor skills to add your own code.

You can get this up and running in less than an hour and I’m going to tackle that as well as examples for playing with MQTT, setting up a web GUI, and writing to log files. To make Node-RED persistent on your network you need a server, but it’s lean enough to run from a Raspberry Pi without issue, and it’s even installed by default in BeagleBone distributions. Code for all examples in this guide can be found in the tutorial repository. Let’s dive in!

Continue reading “Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT)” →

Embedding A Smart Switch In A Java Factory

January 6, 2020 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

When you need coffee, you don’t need any hassles standing between you and caffeination. Especially ironic hassles, like having to do more to turn on appliances inside of home automation schemes than you did without them.

[Maurice Makaay] bought a smart plug to add this beautiful drip coffee machine to his Z-Wave setup, but it isn’t all that smart. Starting the brew remotely means making sure that both the machine’s power switch and the smart plug switch are on. Some members of the household still like making their coffee the old-fashioned way, so [Maurice] came up with a smart, single switch solution to satisfy both cases.

The answer comes in the form of a Z-Wave switch that takes dual inputs and is small enough to fit inside the machine. After a lot of searching around for compatible, splash-proof parts, [Maurice] replaced the existing on/off rocker with a momentary rocker for making coffee manually. That switch labeled ‘extra heet’ used to turn the warming burner on and off. Since he never uses the burner, the switch receptacle now houses a power indicator light.

[Maurice] went about this mains appliance hack the right way — he used extra thick wires connected with lever nuts, and kept the machine’s equally beautiful spare parts and safety documentation by his side the whole time. A person could probably become a lot more comfortable with the idea of installing these by looking over [Maurice]’s pictures of the process.

You know how coffee makes everything better? Turns out ‘everything’ includes printer filament.

The Smart Home Gains An Extra Dimension

December 29, 2019 by Ben James 15 Comments

With an ever-growing range of smart-home products available, all with their own hubs, protocols, and APIs, we see a lot of DIY projects (and commercial offerings too) which aim to provide a “single universal interface” to different devices and services. Usually, these projects allow you to control your home using a list of devices, or sometimes a 2D floor plan. [Wassim]’s project aims to take the first steps in providing a 3D interface, by creating an interactive smart-home controller in the browser.

Note: this isn’t just a rendered image of a 3D scene which is static; this is an interactive 3D model which can be orbited and inspected, showing information on lights, heaters, and windows. The project is well documented, and the code can be found on GitHub. The tech works by taking 3D models and animations made in Blender, exporting them using the .glTF format, then visualising them in the browser using three.js. This can then talk to Hue bulbs, power meters, or whatever other devices are required. The technical notes on this project may well be useful for others wanting to use the Blender to three.js/browser workflow, and include a number of interesting demos of isolated small key concepts for the project.

We notice that all the meshes created in Blender are very low-poly; is it possible to easily add subdivision surface modifiers or is it the vertex count deliberately kept low for performance reasons?

This isn’t our first unique home automation interface, we’ve previously written about shAIdes, a pair of AI-enabled glasses that allow you to control your devices just by looking at them. And if you want to roll your own home automation setup, we have plenty of resources. The Hack My House series contains valuable information on using Raspberry Pis in this context, we’ve got information on picking the right sensors, and even enlisting old routers for the cause.