Using Bluetooth to control a NeoPixel LED strip

Using Bluetooth to control a NeoPixel LED strip
This is the first try of using the latest Bluetooth SoC from Nordic Semiconductor to drive a NeoPixel LED strip composed of 12 WS2812b LEDs. WS2812b LEDs are full color LEDs that can be controlled individually via one single wire, also known as NeoPixel LEDs. I am not going to cover a lot of details ...

Air Quality Monitor

Air Quality Monitor
One thing about having to live in a city is to watch out for the air quality, a more beautiful phrase for air pollution. There are a lot of things inside the air that affect its overall quality. Pollutant is one of those things. There are different kind of pollutants in the air, including natural and ...

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station (Part 3)

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station (Part 3)
The circuit The circuit is very simple thanks to the I2C component. Noted with the NodeMCU dev board, when configuring for deep sleep, one will need to connect GPIO16 to RST. More, GPIO2 must be keep High while GPIO15 must keep Low. This is not explicitly mentioned anywhere but in their design doc. Looks like ...

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station (Part 2)

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station (Part 2)
Node-Red Node-Red is a browser based tool to let you quickly and easily construct your own logic of handling various IoT devices, including subscribing the MQTT messages, listening to HTTP requests, reading and writing to Databases, publishing to MQTT brokers and responding to HTTP requests. It also allows you to define specific functions written in ...

Making your solar power station 2

Making your solar power station
My house’s balcony does not have a power outlet, but I want to take the weather data from there to feed my Home IoT the information on the temperature, relative humidity, sun light, etc.. All these time my weather station in my balcony (recently upgraded) was living on a 8800mAh Li-ion rechargeable battery pack, and ...

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station

Node-Red, MQTT and the new Weather Station
The weather station and home monitor I built using the Particle-Core were working perfectly well, except that the weather station, being far from any power source, need to be run on battery. However, the power consumption of the Particle-Core was not too battery friendly even though it is designed to wake up each 10 minutes to report ...