September 27, 2026I decided to have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for my Home Assistant (running on a Raspberry Pi). The design I came up with is shown below:
The input from the mains is supplied by a 15V AC to DC adapter (wall wart). This is shown as Vcc/Vss on …
September 19, 2026Debugging is much better than littering your code with print statements for lots of reasons - which I’m not going to go into here. But setting debugging up is not always straightforward.
To make things easier, I use an esp32 s3 board that had JTAG …
March 24, 2026It turned out that the original mouse trap wasn’t sensitive enough. Very small mice just didn’t trigger it. So I decided to improve the design.
The case of the trap is clear, so I thought I could have a beam of light going from one side to the …
March 11, 2026So we thought we might have a mouse under the kitchen units…
This isn’t the first time we’ve had mice. And if you don’t think there are any in your house, well maybe it’s because you haven’t noticed them. They are very …
March 8, 2026I decided to check all my microSD cards and decided to use f3 - Fight Flash Fraud. I also decided to do this using my Windows PC. So I was going to need to use WSL2 and Ubuntu and set it up using Connecting USB devices. I managed it, but there was enough …
February 27, 2026The purpose of this project was to connect an Arduino Nano to the USB port that Home Assistant was running on. For me that is a Raspberry Pi 4 but this solution should work with any Home Assistant hardware. And the reason for using a serial connection over …
February 6, 2026Today I updated the website to use Hugo instead of Jekyll. This has been on my list of things to do for some time. It should be easier than it is - that was the whole reason I used Jekyll in the first place. Anyway, after several attempts at doing this …
February 21, 2023I have been looking at TensorFlow and following some of the tutorials. I have a camera that looks out over the front garden using a Raspberry Pi 3. It’s has quite a low resolution and frame rate (deliberately so that it doesn’t use a lot of …
December 22, 2022A while back (before I was using Home Assistant) I built a COB light controller board. The idea was to have lights under the eaves all round the outside of our house (bungalow). They look like this:
In this picture there are three lights, but around the …
March 28, 2022I use Home Assistant (HASS) around the house to switch some of the lights on and off automatically and to monitor the temperature. I plan to use HASS for other automation tasks, maybe controlling things in the garden (e.g. watering plants in the …