Playin' around with Electronics and Computers
Anything that as result has a tangible, (hopefully) useful thing.
For a relative that’s paraplegic, I modified the housing of the remote control for the electric wheelchair wheels Alber e-motion M25 to make the usage easier. Mainly, the small housing was made thicker and larger for better handling. Also, one knob was moved to a different position.
The project is not very sophisticated, but I publish it anyhow – perhaps some other handicapped person can benefit from it.
Continue reading “Modified Housing for Alber e-motion M25 Remote Control”
In order to prevent my venetian window blinds to go down on timer in front of my open window-style terrace door, potentially locking me out, I needed to know if the door handle was in the “open” position. However, I did not want to use a battery powered radio sensor, but the existing door open/close magnetic sensor in the door frame. Here’s my solution.
Continue reading “Convert Window/Door Sensor to Handle Sensor”
I wrote a Python EPG scraper for the EPG data of the German TV stations broadcast by ARD. It is legal for private use. Here I share the code and my thoughts behind it.
The installation of my fuel cell heating required a bi-directional power meter. Bonn Netz, my local power network provider, uses meters of type EasyMeter Q3M which have two infrared interfaces: A bidirectional D0 interface, and a read-only info interface. I use the info interface (INFO-DSS) to read out power consumption and production of the three phases. For this, I built an optical interface, a 3D printed housing for it, and use the UART of a Raspberry Pi with python to get the values.
Continue reading “Interfacing EasyMeter Q3M via Info-Interface”
I built a treasure chest which opens if a riddle is solved. To prove that the riddle is solved, the players need to put the correct three RFID/NFC tokens (out of several tokens to choose from) onto three RFID readers in the correct order. If they fail too often, a curse is uttered! In this post I describe the hardware selection, the electronics, the assembly and the software.
I want to integrate my new Viessmann Vitovalor 300-P fuel cell heating into my home automation. For this, I use the Optolink interface, vcontrold from the openv community, and create my own configuration files from several sources.
Continue reading “Interfacing Vitovalor 300-P with a Raspberry Pi”
The BNO055 is a capable IMU that has on-chip sensor fusion and filtering. Interfacing can be done using I²C and UART. When used with the Raspberry via I²C, you get erroneous measurements because of the I²C clock stretching bug of the Raspberry. Using the UART, results are correct.
Continue reading “Motion Sensor PoC: BNO055 and Raspberry Pi Subtleties”
To create a lamp with adjustable color temperature and brightness, I use a warm/cold white dual LED strip, an ATtiny45 MCU with N-channel MOSFETs and two adjustable resistors. This article contains the hardware and software setup. The title image of this blog shows the project.