Internet Enabled Night Light. I made this out of an old wall wart and an ESP8266 SOC module. Basically took the guts out of the wall wart and replaced them with the contents of a much more modern wall wart (smaller) which left space for the ESP8266 module, the PIR sensor and other bits. The device uses MQTT to communicate trigger events and periodic measurements to a custom cloud service.

• Temperature - DHT11
• Humidity - DHT11
• Brightness - LDR (Light Dependent Resistor)
• Movement - PIR Module (DSN-FIR800)

Gallery

Here is a small ESP8266 prototype using a DHT11 and an LDR for light level sensing. This module is super convenient; it has USB to RS232 integrated and also has standard spacing so it can be put into a bread board.

The kids broke their iPad charge cable. They are not too hard to repair. I backed up the connector with a piece of cable tie as strain relief and heat shrunk it all together.

Lots and lots of pigtails soldered onto LED strips!

I am helping out with a project at work to install LED lighting in our DC. Should be awesome.

Had a mate around today for a BBQ and we built some sensors and wrote some code for the ESP8266.

Cleaned out and tested my mates tropical fish tank light. These are really nice. You can adjust blue / white proportions of lights.

eBay score - direct from China of course. Got a bunch of jumpers and also matching 2,3,4 and 5 way connectors.

I bought a few of these cheap ESP8266-12 modules from eBay. I'm pretty impressed so far with how easy it is to get a simple web server up and running.

Key learnings:

• The module has a number of IO pins which must have set state to run and another state to flash. GPIO0 needs to be tied low to flash.
• Needs hundreds of mA - can't run from USB->RS232 converter power.
• minicom (linux) doesn't send the required CRLF to the module. Have to manually use CTRL+M, CTRL+J
• Needs to be flashed with NodeMCU firmware to use LUA

python esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x00000 ../Downloads/nodemcu_integer_0.9.6-dev_20150704.bin

I was given this interesting tube. The Philips DLS10. It's a thermal delay tube designed to delay the switch on of the HT (High Tension) section so that tubes are at temperature before HT is applied. This one is operational.

I created this Bluetooth FM tranmitter thingy from two cheap eBay items. Combining them reduces the crap hanging around in the car and means just one cord freeing the USB socket for charging.

Cleaned off the last of the cloth insulation on the secondaries. I also scraped back the enamel and tinned all the leads. I am poking 6.3V AC down the high current secondaries on this Ferguson PF181 transformer that I am working on to try and determine where the HT and Primaries are. This is going to be a great transformer to use once I've made it safe. 5V @2A, 12.6V centre tapped @2A. 6.3V @2A. 770V centre tapped HT (385V).

Trying to clean off my work area. Lots of bench scapings to sort out.

The PCBs I ordered came back today. These are a prototype TSP-14 socket for GR-211 nixie tubes. They make use of Mill Max solder-in ferrules. This is part of a group nixie clock project.

Got the old Yamaha A-760 out of storage. Dusted out with brush / compressed air. Lubed all the pots - they were crackling. Ran it up pretty hard on some PA speakers. Can smell electrolyte =( One of the caps is definitely leaking, just no spills or pushed out vents yet. Will have to see how we go... I probably should just re-cap...

Yup. Thanks again Australia Post. These are United Electric UE-468 triodes.

I started pulling apart this Ferguson PF181 transformer in preparation for use. It has old material based sheathing on the flyleads which I plan to replace with spagetti (PVC though). Unfortunately I didn't finish this off. I will have to continue later. It also looks like some kind of bug has made a house at some point in there.

I opened up the aircon because the blower does not seem to start. After some probing around I rubbed up against the motor body and burned myself. Yep, it's probably got shorted/burnt windings. It gets really hot. You can sometimes start the blower by giving the squirrel cage a little push. The bottom blower has nearly the same mountings but is 90W, the bottom blower pulls inside air through the condenser and then fires it out the window duct. The upper fan is just 55W, but has 3 speed taps. I may just get the 90W part and cable all three speed relays together. Usually if you need this thing on, it's going to be going full boar anyway!

I received my PCB today from http://dangerousprototypes.com/ FreePCB Drawer

I've recently set up an ESXi lab with 3 servers. The problem with enterprise servers in a home environment is the noise and the power consumtion - obviously you are not going to want to have a rack full of gear running 24/7 at home. The other issue is the standby power consumption at ~100W each when they are powered down. Some of them have components that run even when the system is off.

The solution: Turn them off after a session in the lab experimenting or studying. Then unplug them.

My servers are in a shed away from the house - so I don't really want to go out there at the end of a session at 12:00AM or when it's raining or whatever. The same goes for powering the lab on.

You may recognise these parts from other projects I've built. The Fermentation Controller was designed to control up to 4 mains devices with triacs. The Fermentation Controller was to be controlled with a parallel interface (which of course nothing has now). The Fermentation Controller consists of two dual triac boards which will switch up to 10A each at mains. They will not be working too hard in their new job controlling only a max of about ~1KW across the 3 servers under load. The brains of the power rail is the TG Watchdog. This is an RS232 controlled board which allows you to toggle it's four outputs using a terminal emulator. This can also be wrapped with an expect script or py-expect etc etc to make it more friendly or automate it.