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Making a dumb light switch smart
A few months back, when planning the rewiring of our house, we decided not to include any switched 5A sockets; you know the kind of arrangement where a switch on the wall can turn on some floor lights and lamps in a room? If you want light, but something subdued,… Read ⇢
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Heating our bathroom
The bathroom in our old house was cold. Really cold. It had two external, solid brick walls, and the room was tiled floor to ceiling. We had a rubber floor covering, so at least you didn’t suffer from very cold feet. We had a lot of condensation, which unfortunately led… Read ⇢
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Moving a wall to create a bigger bathroom!
When we purchased our house, one thing that we didn’t really like was the small bathroom. The layout is pretty standard for the type of house, with an airing cupboard and W.C. over the garage. We knew we wanted to retain the bath, for the kids mostly, and we knew… Read ⇢
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Insulating our 1950s suspended floors
As we’re renovating our new house, one of the things I wanted to do was to insulate the floors of the downstairs rooms. When we renovated our old house, not doing something about the floors was something I regretted. At the time we were expecting our first child’s arrival, so… Read ⇢
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New House – Technology Choices
I’ve recently bought a new house. We completed renovated our first house and, in the process, we made an awful lot of mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, we got an awful lot of things right too, but we’ve always had some annoyances. These were born of inexperience and naeivaty. With… Read ⇢
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Installing Konnected Alarm
Back in February of this 2020 (This post has taken me a year to write!), I preordered an alarm panel from Konnected.io. The idea with the Konnected alarm panel is that you can take your existing wired alarm and connect it to your smart home setup. It’s a very clever… Read ⇢
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LED Clock, Part III: Alexa?
Whilst I await delivery of more WS2812 LEDs, I wanted to start investigating how I can leverage the Alexa Gadget Toolkit integration, so that when I set a timer using Alexa, my LED clock can show the countdown. Amazon make an Echo Wall Clock which does just that. I found… Read ⇢
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LED Clock, Update!
I managed to rework the time calculation and hour hand movement! I removed the RTC component and just let the loop run, with simple counters to simulate the passage of second, minutes and hours. I think the transition of the “hands” needs to be smoother, more analogue. I’ll have to… Read ⇢
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LED Clock, Part II: Tick, Tock
In Part I, I covered the basics of controlling the LEDs. This covered the hands of the clock. The second part of my investigation covers time and how to make the clock tick. The ESP 8266 I am using for this prototyping work doesn’t include a Real Time Clock, so… Read ⇢
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