Hi 👋, In this short article I want to showcase how I implemented a custom HomeKit accessory with python. My Home Assistant’s SD card died 🪦 a few days ago and the support for GPIO based sensors will be removed in newer releases. This makes it unsuitable for my needs, while giving me the perfect opportunity to try other things. To continue monitoring temperature and humidity in my home I’ve built a custom HomeKit accessory with HAP Python. ...
Hi 👋, In this short article I will highlight how to use the BME680 Home Assistant integration with a BME680 Sensor. Please note that I’m running Home Assistant core on Raspbian OS. Raspberry Pi Setup Before connecting the sensor, you will need to enable the I2C interface on your Raspberry Pi and install some additional tools that are useful for debugging. To enable the I2C interface execute: 1 sudo raspi-config Then go to Interfacing options->I2C and select yes. ...
Hi 👋 The purpose of this article is to get you started quickly with a Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. It’s a simple walkthrough on how to install Home Assistant and configure it so it will boot with your PI. I will use my old Raspberry PI V3 board. Flashing the Raspberry PI OS You will need a microSD card of reasonable size, I’m using a 16GB one and a USB Adapter to connect it with my PC. ...
Hello everyone, I just want to let you know that I’ve released a C# library for interfacing with the PMS5003 (Particulate Matter Sensor) via UART. The code is available on Github and the package is available on NuGet. If you have any feedback or need some feature into the library, please open an issue on Github. Thank you!
Hi In this article we’ll test out the PMS5003 sensor in order to see if it works. I’ve forgot to buy a connector board, so we will do a manual connection to the Raspberry Pi 3 B V2. This involves cutting the wires and adding some resistors. Please note that you need: 5 Jumper Wires 2 Resistors 10K Ohm Raspberry Pi Setup Before connecting the sensor to the Pi we need to configure the Pi for this usecase. ...
Hello everyone! I’ve been working lately on my little project involving Raspberry Pi and .NET, during my free time. Now, I’ve introduced a new technology, Android! The project needed a front-end and It took me a long time to decide how to implement it and what technology to use. I was conflicting between a cross platform desktop application or a web application. I initially thought Electron would have been a great choice since it covers both, but it doesn’t work out of the box with gRPC and I needed some proxies which complicated the things on the backend, not to mention JavaScript is horrible in every imaginable way. ...
Hello, I’m still working on my NucuCar project from time to time, I’m currently at my parents home and I left the raspberry pi at my apartment so I’m only testing the builds it on my computer. Luckily I can test the telemetry by using the CPU temperature sensor implemented by dotnet IoT. For the next step, I wanted an effective way to store telemetry data in the cloud, preferably for free, since this is a hobby project after all. ...
I’ve tried to use Google’s Firebase with the Firebase Admin SDK in my C# project. The good news is that the Admin SDK is easy to use and all you need to do is call two methods. The authentication part is handled by an environment variable which points to some .json file which you download. The bad news is that the SDK depends on gRPC and the dotnet version of it doesn’t work well on the Raspberry Pi. ...
Hello everyone, A while ago I started working on a pet project called NucuCar. It’s a platform written in .NET for the Raspberry Pi in which I’m trying to implement various utility functions to create a complete piece of software that can be used to build a remote controlled car for the Pi. The project is open source and it can be found on GitHub: Since I didn’t buy a toy car and I don’t have much space in my apartment I was working only on the sensors module, which currently has support for the BME680 environment sensor and the CPU temperature sensor build in the Pi. ...
I haven’t done any embedded development in a while and I was thinking to build myself a remote controlled toy car with video streaming. The project is going to take me a while. To build it I’m going to use C#. I’m already too familiar with Python and a little challenge doesn’t hurt. To interface with the hardware, I’m going to use the .Net Core IoT Libraries from Microsoft. My idea was to create a set of .Net Core services that communicate internally via gRPC and an ASP.Net Core web application to control the car. (Now that I’m writing this I’m thinking that could possibly drop the web app and use gRPC directly from the client). ...