@tomasmcguinness

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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, it gives you an alternative…

  • 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 to some mold. We tried…

  • 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 we wanted a separate shower.…

  • 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 speed was of the essence.…

  • 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 this new project, we have…

  • 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 bit of kit, which I…

  • 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 an open source project called…

  • 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 investigate if FastLED can do…

  • 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 I was required to add…

  • LED Clock, Part I: Hands

    The first part of making an LED clock was actually learning how to control the LEDs in the strip. I had experimented with the LED strip before, flashing a rainbow, before realising I had no practical use the damn thing. At the time, I had used a Neopixel library. Upon googling the subject again, another…

  • Lockdown LED Clock

    A year or two ago, I picked up a WS2812B LED strip, but, for the life of me, could never think of anything useful to do with it. Recently, however, I came across these LED powered clocks. This feels like a project that will combine a few things: ESP MCU Real Time Clock WS2812B strip…

  • Do we have any hot water?

    A common occurrence in our house is bath time. Another common occurrence is not having enough water for afore mentioned bath. Our hot water is provided by a system boiler/unvented cylinder arrangement and I use a Nest to control the hot water (more on that later). The current schedule has it running the boiler for…