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...

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 :

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...