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Tag Archives: IoT

Water quality monitor for your pool

Posted on May 25, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

Are you tired of checking the pH level and chlorine concentration of water in your swimming pool everyday? This Pool Buddy project from Johan Brichau might be helpful for you to monitor the water quality automatically. It will also upload the data online continuously so that you can easily access it from anywhere. It uses the Ph and ORP kits by atlas-scientific.com for sensing the water quality and the Particle Photon for collecting the sensor data and sending them to an online database over the WiFi connection. A small solar panel is also mounted to keep the device running autonomously.

Pool water quality monitor

The Photon firmware boots the device every 5 minutes and takes a series of measurements during one minute: pH, ORP, temperature, battery charge and WiFi strength. The average of each measurement is sent as an event to the Particle cloud where an integration made by Particle takes care of forwarding those events to the Google pub/sub service. On the Google cloud platform, I have a cloud function that stores the value in a datastore.

IoT enabled soldering iron

Posted on July 19, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Vegard’s hacked his soldering iron and made it IoT enabled using NodeMCU, which is a ESP8266-based development platform. Now Vegard’s soldering station reports its set temperature to the Thingspeak server over WIFI.

IoT enabled soldering station

It also sends me Prowl messages on my Iphone when I forget to turn it off.

It all started when I needed to fix the display on the Soldering-iron itself after some guys at the soldering-iron factory forgot to mount the segment display properly.
The road to IoT is anything but streamlined yet. The NodeMCU & Arduino IDE integration is in it early stages and the tutorials out there are few and full of frustation.

Meet Konekt Dash, a cellular development kit for IoT

Posted on April 5, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Konekt Dash is a new cellular network development kit for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications and is looking for funding at Kickstarter.

Konekt Dash

The Konekt Dash is a cellular development kit for building Internet of Things (IoT) devices. You can use it to build all sorts of fun connected products like sensors, tracking devices, alarm systems, connected car applications, and more (see examples below).

The Konekt Platform is made to bring enterprise grade features to the individual developer, so its perfect for a solo hobby project or building the connected hardware business of your dreams!

Each Konekt Dash comes preloaded with a Konekt Global SIM and 6 months of our basic data plan (1MB/month or 6MB total). If you need more data, thats cool too; we have great carrier agreements already in place to provide super affordable connectivity at higher data levels (check the deets below for pricing).

The Konekt Dash will work anywhere you get a cellular signal and can easily and securely communicate to the internet or other devices via the Konekt Cloud.

A simple IoT demo using ESP8266 and Arduino

Posted on December 2, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

ESP8266 is a highly integrated serial-to-wifi tranceiver chip that can be used to connect any microcontroller with a serial port to a WiFi network for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The best part of it is that the breakout board for this chip costs only $3 on Ebay, and the chip itself can be programmed/customized for a complete IoT solution. This instructable describes a simple demo of using the ESP8266 and Arduino to send temperature measurements to a remote webserver using WiFi connection. In this example, the remote server is ThingSpeak and the tenperature sensor used is Maxim’s DS18B20.

Temperature web logger using ESP8266

Cloud-connected automatic solar tracker

Posted on November 6, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

The use of solar tracking systems allows the solar panels to track the course of Sun during the day time and ensures that the panels are receiving maximum solar input. A photovoltaic system with a solar tracker can boost the output power by 20-40%, compared to a fixed installation. While there are lots of resources available on internet on solar trackers, this particular solar tracking system is unique in the sense that it offers lot more connectivity and other fancy features than just tracking the Sun. It is built to drive a 90 Watts solar panel with azimuth and elevation control using two step motors. The project is controlled with Electric Imp, which derives the inclination and azimuth angle of the solar panel using a 6-axis accelerometer/magnetometer. The use of Electric Imp also allows internet cloud connectivity to the project.

Cloud-connected solar tracker

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