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Sunday, December 29, 2019

Ghost switching can be a bitch if your switch is your main circuit breaker






On my way to eat my own dog food, I learned the hard way that ghost switching is kind of the default problem most people will stumble upon when setting up their MQTT switch for the first time.This is not a big deal when you are configuring a single light switch or some other not so critical appliance. But when your switch is in series with your main circuit breaker, ghost switching suddenly gains a whole different level of importance.

Sunday, December 22, 2019

ZMAi-90 (or SMTONOFF WDS688) DIN rail meter/switch - more details on GPIOs and configuration

As an update to the previous post where I have shared the details on how to "Tasmotize" this device, I am adding more detail on what is the physical assignement of GPIO pins from the ESP8266, to other components in this device.

Given the pins from the ESP8266 microcontroller that are exposed in its breakout board (which in turn is SMD soldered to the main PCB):

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Intrusion / motion / door opening detector using a NodeMCU, some sensors, and Tasmota


The Espressif Systems chip manufacturer kind of created a revolution by opening the door to the creation of dirt cheap chips for building IoT devices. Its low cost led to introduction in the market, of many types of home automation devices, such as switches, light dimmers, smart bulbs, HVAC systems and what not.

On par with that, the open source community quickly became an interested party as well, and this led to the introduction of tools for quickly allowing developers to write interesting applications for practically anything based on these chips. It is the case of the Arduino core for the ESP8266 chip -  https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino. This allowed for Arduino IDE accustomed developers, to write their own code, and either replace the original firmware on commercial devices featuring the ESP8266, or use open-source board designs such as NodeMCU and build their own custom devices.