Manukau tech projects

Description: This is the research project to understand the home automation system which I would like to develop when I'm building my own house in the future. Burglary is a common threat while living in South Auckland. My wife's mountain bike was stolen from the garage in our first year living in the South Auckland. Even though we have moved to different house and living in better neighbourhood now, always worried and paranoid about the garage door. So this project developed to monitor the garage door and alert if the door is open. Some of the terminology used in this post:  Home Assistant -  Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3. Track and control all devices at home and automate control.  Many components are supported well by Home assistant community (Wemo, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Google Assistant, Zigbee, MQTT, IFTT, etc..) MQTT (aka MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine or “Internet of Things” conn...

Audio interactive game for kids around letters and numbers learning Description Toddlers are attracted to computers, they want to play with it, press the keyboard all the time when their parents use it - pretty much for everything.  I was browsing the web for games designed to help kids learn their letters and ABC when I decided to take the opportunity to build a simple game allowing the child to discover the letters, while taking an active role in building the game it self. Here is the concept: The game displays a letter and at the same time plays an audio relating to the letter. If the player presses the right key at the first attempt, a congratulation sound is played and lots of progress is made. If the right letter / character is found after several attempts, less progress is made, no congrats sound is played. The child or the parents can record every sound matching the letters as well as the congrats messages. I got my daughter to record a short voice memo to ma...

Drawing interface using processing 3 Description This sketch allows to draw shapes simply. Click once to activate the pen. An initial color is selected. Press an arrow button to select color and mix cyan, magenta, yellow, black using arrows. Press SPACE to get back to drawing. Draw as long as the pen is activated moving the mouse. Then click again to deactivate the pen. Each line can be erased by pressing SPACE. Erasing takes place in the reverse order of it being drawn. code Processing:

Colourful ant-like particles description  Particles created, move, interact, grow from encounters and disappear. click and drag to create new particles Processing code: Automated vehicles reaching target and avoiding obstacles  description  Processing code: Coil spring description Processing code: Spring 2D description Processing code:

Voice controlled Lego merry-go-round Build a model using lego and a motor Drive the motor at various speed using an arduino board as variable frequency drive Send commands to the arduino board using your voice, through a Processing sketch on your computer and bluetooth That's it, and it works Description   hardware  A Lego motor - old motor from Lego technics - DC current - 4.5V Arduino - Uno in our case Bluetooth board - ref  Transistor Diode Breadboard and jumper cables Arduino code : Processing code :

Moving average on analog input Description This small project shows how to implement a moving average with a lightweight form in order to smooth raw analog values. The value is then used to position a servo Image code Arduino: Using Ultrasonic sensor  Description In this project, we are using a US sensor. Very first step to understand the behaviour of the sensor through the serial interface. Image code Arduino:

Wifi enabled temperature and humidity sensor and client sending email notifications description This project was developed as part of a research to build a temperature automation system for our charming but cold Auckland home. Relying on electric oil heaters as sole source of heating in children's room, the aim was to monitor continuously the temperature at night and to turn on or off the heater according to the measured temperature. The project described in this post does the first half and mode demanding part of the job which is log a temperature, broadcast it to the web using the MQTT protocol through the house's wifi. A small and cheap ESP8266 Wifi board programmes using the Arduino language reads temperature and humidity through an DHT22 sensor and broadcasts the values to an MQTT server at set intervals. A custom client written in the java based Processing 3 and running on a computer located anywhere (Macbook in this case) displays the readings and sends not...

Journey through the internet of things world Wanted to explore and understand the ecosystem of internet of things. Started with some hardware ESP8266 ESP-01S is used in a range of relatively cheap board which can connect to a wifi network, handle some IOs and be programmed using the arduino language and software. Mated with a temperature sensor and a power regulator (supports 3.3v only), you get a small circuit  that can read data and publish it. libraries used : dht mqtt wifi Where to ? MQTT is a protocol used to handle object to object communications. Light and supported by free brokers and libraries for several languages, it takes a few hours to get started and publish the first message. broker used : hivemq also mosquitto and other In our basic example, the object sends data - publishes and we retrieve the data published on a phone or website. The broker is a middle ground where the data is made available. Using the data many free IOS apps out ther...