It’s a bit sad how deserted this community is, would love to connect more with other makers.
Let’s rattle the cage a bit, who of you is here, and what are you working on?
I’ll start: A wireless cryptographic keystore & signer. Keys are generated with the hardware RNG and stored AES-encrypted with the user’s password, and you can request signatures via BLE.
Boring stuff- Sprinkler controllers Current monitoring on a few circuits in the panel so the girlfriend can see if she left her hair straightener switched on
I plopped one onto a relay for a pump on my rain barrel to water my garden from rainwater
Next year gonna get it reading the water level in the barrel
I have a Shelly plug on my rain barrel. It monitors the current to the pump and stops it when the barrel is empty.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about Shelly plugs! Are you in North America? Whenever I look at them they seem kinda Euro-centric and I don’t look as hard as maybe I should…
My whole outdoor tech ecosystem runs on 12V, I have a little solar array that keeps an old car battery topped up. It’s a 12 V pump and the solar controller has a 5V USB output that I run the esp off of.
Can you run a Shelly off 5/12 V? Super curious about those devices
They have some older DC stuff but most of their offerings in the US are 120vac. Their price to performance is great
nice, not everyone can boast a high wife-approval-factor
This kind of stuff I enjoy. Got a heated mirror, still haven’t (but should) added some kind of logic to power it down when the kids forgot to do so.
I have two projects going on right now (as more-or-less a newbie to ESP32s and microcontrollers/DIY electronics in general):
First, I’m working on WLED Christmas lights. I started out with a (relatively) expensive off-the-shelf controller, but haven’t been able to run more than about 200 LEDs on each of the two channels it supports, which isn’t enough to run all my lights without hooking multiple strands up to the same channel and letting them duplicate node addresses/mirror each other.
I’m now trying to replace that with my own DIY controller using this dev board (I think it’s a generic clone of a NodeMCU-32S? IDK, I picked without much thought because it was cheap, had lots of exposed I/O pins and USB-C), a 12V->5V buck converter, and a SN74AHCT125N used as a logic level shifter (especially because my LEDs are 12V), but I’ve been having problems getting it to work when soldered to a perfboard even though it worked on a solderless breadboard.
Second, I got a great deal on some Matter/Thread smart light bulbs on clearance at Home Depot the other day, which means I suddenly need a “Thread Border Router” for my Home Assistant setup. So I got myself one of these, but haven’t started trying to set it up yet.
Esp8266, but I realized my PC was using too much idle power when I wasn’t around so I slapped it to an Arduino Leonardo to emulate sleep/wake keyboard combos so I can sleep/wake the machine via home assistant
that’s certainly one way to do it 🙂 the newer esp32-s2 and s3 also support native usb, if you ever want a smaller package
Like you can emulate a keyboard off of them? That’d be neat for maannyy projects I envision.
I just have like a reel of esp-01s on hand and had a spare Leonardo so it was just what I had on hand.
I might pair it down all the way and have the machine open a socket to listen for a sleep command and get wake-on-lan going and get it all working without additional hardware.
I would just use ssh, then you can remotely tell the computer to sleep or do anything else. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Grow R503 scanner attached to one of those CYDs for unlocking one of the house-locks. Combined with NFC as second factor.
But, as I want to use Forgejo and a couple of workflows to run pre-commit etc and attempt to this in a nomad/vault/consul cluster and use nginx as frontend and traefik as proxy, I kinda get distracted occasionally.
At least achieved to split stuff like WiFi, handling nvs, snmp and generic stuff into separate components and git submodules. With renovate keeping all projects in sync.
And pushing a tag results in a new build/upload and enabling all the different projects to use ota to update to the latest versions.
sounds interesting, and your process seems to be as chaotic as mine, i love it
Well, chaotic maybe, but I am just interested in multiple things (unfortunately all at once).
Forgejo is really great for self hosting git, combined with pre-commit and the esp-idf docker image to build stuff is really nice. Commits get checked and when a new tag is pushed, a new image of the code will be build and pushed to a location where the different devices can grab an update using OTA.
As the number of different projects is increasing and updating is stable but annoying, the next approach will be notifications using matt so stuff will update directly after building an image.
And I really love the esp-idf-lib, a great asset to add sensors in a convenient way.
I attached an esp + relay to my garage door. It is probably the first project where I really use an esp. I flashed it with Tasmota, but don’t really nike it. I have no home assistant or similar running, so I open the webpage manually…
ugh having to pull up a website is tedious, you could maybe try using BLE. tasmota/esphome is nice if you use their whole ecosystem.
It’s not that bad. I have a link on my home screen. It is one extra click. I still whish I had a widget or something…
if you’re using Android, check out MacroDroid, you could create a custom widget that sends a http request to it
Ive got a motionnactivated light that has stopped working and I’m gonna lobotomize it and make it MQTT powered.
oh i have taken apart so much stuff, just to ruin it entirely 😅 though i’ve successfully managed to hook up an ESP8266 into my Nespresso machine to turn it on and rinse it by the time i get to the kitchen
Yeah, this little light…I think the PIR sensor in it was failing, I tried replacing it, it’s not acting right after that, so now what I have is a plastic case, a lithium battery, a solar cell and a bigass grid of LEDs.
I am making a time-trial race timer so my club can keep track of their practice times. Someone has to manually do it, taking them out of havinga yarn; and for online tournaments usually someone smashes their best time without it being recorded so doesn’t count.
There’s
- an esp32 powered LIDAR “gate” to start/stop a lap
- an esp32 powering a display (giant 7 segment display made out of neopixels)
- a raspberry pi that acts as an mqtt broker, and relay to the internet
- a website to track and manage all the times
When motivation strikes I’m planning on adding:
- a camera system to the Pi to record and evidence times
- a RFID system to track riders and vehicles, so it can be fully automated.
sweet, keep on building 💪
I have built incubators for several different projects (seedlings, mushrooms, tempeh, fermentation, etc…). Learning how to control a heat distribution in a safe and efficient manner has been a bit of a journey for me. Just recently I begun experimenting with positive temperature coefficient (PTC) heaters and I am very happy with them as I feel much safer running these than ceramic/IR heat lamps and regular heating elements.
At the moment I am heating an incubator for petri dishes using a 12V/100W PTC heater with a fan hooked up to an stc-3008 thermostat. The PTC undergoes on/off cycles that keep the temperature near 26 C, but, even when setting the upper and lower control limits quite tight, the temperature still oscillates up to +/- 2 C during these cycles.
I have been studying how to implement a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller to avoid the on/off cycles. My next experiment is to try to control the power of the PTC with a Mean Well HLG-120H-12AB LED-driver in constant-voltage mode and the ESP32 as the PID controller.
that’s so interesting, are you doing this at work or are you an avid gardener?
It’s for hobby!
But I did work with cell cultures (with lab-grade incubators) in the past, and I am currently working with a company developing sensors for industrial systems. So, the concept of PID I learned at work recently. And at work I also write some firmware for interfacing sensors with micro-controllers.
I’m waiting for my https://www.seeedstudio.com/MR60BHA2-60GHz-mmWave-Sensor-Breathing-and-Heartbeat-Module-p-5945.html to arrive so that I can see what I can do with it.
sweet, let us know what you end up building 🙂
Open source Doorbell camera
amazing <3 care to share your repo? i’ve been thinking of creating something similar before
