I got my wife this Accolmile Antelope 1S electric bicycle with Bafang components from their latest M-series lineup of mid-drive motors and displays which communicate over a CAN bus. It’s a grea...
Makita doesn’t make an official USB-C PD (power delivery) adaptor (they only have ADP05 with two 5V/2A ports) so I found this UDCB094 on AliExpress (affiliate link) with PD65W output and with v...
https://kaspars.net/blog/usb-c-pd65w-adapter-charger-18v-20v-batteries
Meshtastic is a wonderful project for creating decentralised text-based communication networks for local communities using low power (and low cost) Lora radios. Fun fact — the Meshtastic logo a...
I’ve always wanted a rack mount UPS for all of our homelab gear, and PowerWalker VI 500 was pretty much the cheapest option at EUR 192 at the time. Here are my notes and observations after havi...
For a home server hosting mostly Docker containers I’ve always wanted a computer with proper and multiple disk drives for data redundancy instead of SD cards used by most single-board computers...
Until recently Zemismart ZMHK-01 was the only Zigbee hub with Apple HomeKit integration. Now there is also NEO NAS-ZW05B0 Zigbee hub (affiliate link) with a HomeKit integration produced by Shenzh...
https://kaspars.net/blog/neo-nas-zw05b0-tuya-zigbee-homekit-hub
It is a single unit for ventilation with heat recovery and a heat pump against the exhaust air for heating or cooling the incoming air and producing domestic hot water, and another heat pump agai...
The diminishing returns of insulation thickness is a legend referenced by many builders and architects which is actually incorrect. It is often paired with financial payback calculations that don...
With electric hot water heaters it is possible to use smart sockets with energy meter capabilities to measure the electricity consumption when the water is not actually used and is heated only to...
https://kaspars.net/blog/electric-hot-water-heater-insulation-efficiency
These are two devices with identical PM2.5/PM10 sensors (boxes with the metal cover), temperature and humidity sensors (top center) which are connected to an STC 8G1K08 microcontroller which prep...
https://kaspars.net/blog/tuya-smart-box-house-keeper-air-quality
The Passive House standard has two magic numbers related to the heating and cooling requirements for buildings — 15kWh is the maximum allowed heating and cooling demand per square meter per yea...
https://kaspars.net/blog/ventilation-air-heat-cool-passive-house
Zemismart ZMHK-01 is one of the few hubs that is compatible with Apple HomeKit and can expose non-HomeKit Zigbee devices in the Home app similar to the Aqara G2H camera hub. Behind the scenes it ...
Hiking DDS238-2 ZN/S is a cheap €25 single phase energy meter which can measure import and export energy in addition to all the standard parameters, and has a Modbus interface over RS485. I use...
Aqara G2H (ZNSXJ12LM) is a really nice Zigbee hub and indoor camera with official HomeKit support. Of course it runs Linux so people have discovered ways to connect it to Home Assistant which exp...
As part of an experiment to add domestic water heating capabilities to conventional mini-split ACs, I purchased an air-source heat pump Gree GWH09YD-S6DBA2A which has an inverter controlled compr...
MySensors is a great project for building IoT devices but it tries to do many things — define a general serial communications protocol (similar to ModBus, CAN), provide a software library for m...
WireGuard can be used for a lot of things: Managing router configuration remotely behind NATed networks such as mobile connections. Connecting to your home network while on the road for home auto...
Mini split air conditioners are great little air-source heat pumps that can work in the reverse and provide heating to the building, too. For highly insulated houses built according to the Passiv...
Lollette LE3U is a “copy” of the Mitsubishi FX3U PLC for $60 on AliExpress while the original costs around $1000. All configuration is done using Mitsubishi’s proprietary software GX Develo...
Update: The protocol is now well understood and supported by the Neolink RTSP bridge software and this fork of the Camera Proxy project. Battery powered cameras from Reolink offer remote viewing ...
https://kaspars.net/blog/reolink-battery-camera-remote-protocol
I bought this UseeLink water/gas valve which according to the casing was supposed to be SM-AW713Z with the Zigbee radio but is actually SM-AW713 with a Tuya TYWE3S WiFi radio. No wonder it wasn�...
This is an attempt at reverse engineering the communication protocol used by the Zehnder ComfoSpot 50 ventilation unit with heat recovery. It has the following control board: The “BUS X7” has...
Here are the photos of the Sonoff Si7021 temperature and humidity sensor which uses the Silicon Labs Si7021 sensor attached to the Silicon Labs EFM8BB10F2G-QFN20 microcontroller. The other side o...
Mikrotik routers use CAPsMAN (Controlled Access Point Manager) to configure and synchronize a mesh of wireless access points or CAPs (Controlled Access Points). This is extremely useful for setti...
WireGuard provides unlimited possibilities for creating private and secure networks without having to expose devices to the public internet. In this example I wanted to access the Mikrotik router...
WireGuard is amazing for securely accessing your devices even behind private networks and NATs. I wrote a guide for installing WireGuard on Raspberry Pi. Adding a new devices to your WireGuard ne...
It is currently impossible to get notified of new WordPress.org support forum replies without subscribing to each individual topic via email. See this Meta Track ticket for details. So I created ...
Here is a quick snippet of a PHP to store Contact Form 7 form submissions in TablePress tables. Make sure you update the form-to-table-ID mapping in $form_to_table_map array to match your setup: ...
WireGuard is an awesome tool for securely accessing your Raspberry Pi computers even behind mobile networks that don’t provide a public IP address. It has client applications for iOS, macOS, Wi...
With styles moving into components and critical styles being unique for each layout we no longer get the luxury of preparing and optimizing CSS during the build process (especially for server-sid...