torsdag 1. juni 2017

Sonoff wifi switches for home-assistant

Today I loaded the sonoff switch Sonoff Tasmota.
Programming the
Sonoff with custom
Mqtt firmware.
Sonoff is based off esp8266 with Wi-Fi capabilities.

My home-assistant journey has now included motion sensors, rgb led lights, temperature and humidity sensing. I have control of my webos tv, sonos speakers, my router, also Ikea Trådfri lighting.

The sonoff switches I did not program in Arduino IDE, I used the Atom based platformio.

Whats quite cool is that you have one gpio availible for a sensor too, like dht22 or you can of course run a rgb led strip with adressable leds!

Will do a short writeup about my setup one of these days.

onsdag 10. mai 2017

WS2812B RGB Led Chips

The soldering pads are ok sized even for
persons that arent soldering very often.
Recieved 100 WS2812B RGB Led Chips today.
These are the same kind that is used in the neopixel (and clones of such).

It means you can do adressable RGB leds with "as many" pixels as you want, simply using just data in / data out (and power + ground).

Adafruit has a nice tech sheet of the LED chips (5050): https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812.pdf

I have had fun with these lights in the past, by hacking IKEA lamps, making my own MQTT IoT smart-light (connected to Home Assitant).

So, what are potential use-cases?

  • Very compact lights on a bicycle
  • Very compact lights on a stroller
  • Hidden lighting insde a house, behind a TV etc.
  • Lights for toys/RC-cars, etc.
Since they are individual adressable, you dont use a lot of ports on the MCU.. Let's say you want to make a doll house with rgb lighting in every room, also on the outside. That is not an issue, you can just use a couple of pins on the MCU :-) Then you can use other pins for motion sensors, oled display etc.

Of course there is a limit of how much current you can draw from the MCU, so you might have to provide external power if you are using a lot of leds.

mandag 16. januar 2017

OnePlus 3T - get your nougat

Some countries lag in the update cycle of the infamous phone OnePlus 3T (also the OnePlus 3).

In a few easy steps you can get Nougat (Android 7) today!


  1. Download Opera VPN from Google Play Store
  2. Activate said VPN
  3. Set region to oh Canada
  4. Search for update in menu
  5. Start update
  6. Pause update
  7. Disable VPN
  8. Resume update
Steps 6-8 are optional, yet will speed up the download of said update.