October 14, 2021 Kogan Smart Glass Kettle 1.7L and Tasmota Notes on how to flash Tasmota to a $50 Kogan Smart Glass Kettle 1.7L Tasmota (Also available from the online retailer Dick Smith), and control it with Home Assistant. Categories Home Automation/Projects
July 29, 2020 Tasmota Energy Meter Pulse Output Counting Summary This monitoring was built as part of my whole house 3 phase monitoring project. I had a couple of kWh counters (often called Check Meters) on my main and a sub board. Not as accurate, and can’t monitor V or power factor etc, but useful to look at targeted areas of power use as well as having their own... Categories DIY/Home Automation/Projects/Technology
July 26, 2020 Whole House Surge Suppression for 3 Phase Summary Common in Europe and other locations around the world, but not really in NZ is the use of surge suppression modules in a main DB. I have a few servers and sensitive equipment so thought it might be a good idea as I was building a small power monitoring switchboard anyway. Standard install practice is to use an MCB... Categories DIY/Home Automation/Projects/Technology
July 21, 2020 Whole House 3 Phase Power with PZEM-004T A robust, accurate, low cost and safe whole house electricity monitoring setup, using PZEM-004T modules. These use current transformers (CTs), and send data as TTL Modbus-RTU. Recently Tasmota has added support for up to 3 of these directly (on the same data channel) so there are fewer hoops to jump though to get them working (previously my testing involved sending serial commands) Categories DIY/Home Automation/Home Renovations/Projects/Technology
November 13, 2019 Home Automation: Future Thinking So, home control with your own setup is great, but you have to think about what happens in the event you sell your house, get hit by a bus or someone needs to work on it in the future. Home Automation should add value to a house, not turn people off a sale. This is part 2 of some of... Categories DIY/Home Automation/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
November 13, 2019 Home Automation: Electrical Safety This is part one of some of my notes regarding Home Automation concepts. Part 2 is about planning for the future and house resale value. Electrical Isolation/Safety Electrical safety is very important obviously for home automation, and as well as my tendency to over-engineer, I’m often thinking about ‘what could possibly go wrong‘. One of the things I want to... Categories DIY/Home Automation/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
July 6, 2019 Conversion of Ceiling Attic to Storage In 2019 I converted a ceiling space in our current house to storage (on a budget). You can never have enough home storage. This is the 5th type of install I’ve done like this (Similar in 4 previous houses), and as well as being useful, home buyers love it (if done well). Categories DIY/Projects
June 24, 2018 How to Stop Your Caravan From Disappearing Caravan thefts in New Zealand have become a lot more common in the past few years, and every day or so you hear about another one going missing. Caravans are pretty easy to steal by themselves, as they are light weight, usually easily accessible on a driveway… and they sit home alone when people go to work. An often touted... Categories Projects/Retro Caravans/Technology Comments: 0
May 19, 2018 Tips: Get Your Cabling in Tricky Places Do you have an existing house or structure and trying to get a cable into a tricky place? Here are a few tips from methods I have used over the years. Conduit Sucker There is nothing more annoying than finding a broken cable in a conduit or pipe and having nothing to pull the replacement wire though. it is especially... Categories Projects/Technology Comments: 0
January 15, 2017 1965 Zephyr Caravan Renovation These are the before and after photos of our 1965 15″ Zephyr Deluxe Caravan. It was apparently stored in a shed for 20 years so apart from some general decay, some borer and a bunch of broken and missing stuff, the layout and fittings were mostly original. We’ve had it for a couple of years but completed most of the... Categories DIY/Projects/Retro Caravans/Vehicles Comments: 0
April 19, 2016 Upgrading a 5 Year Old Samsung Galaxy S2 to Android M I needed a phone for my son as he had been given an older ZTE V795 phone running Android Gingerbread. The ridiculous thing about this is that besides the fact there is really no way to easily upgrade or change out the ROM on this phone… you can’t even update the current setup as any ‘play store’ updates fail even... Categories Projects/Technology Comments: 9
February 17, 2016 My Photobooth Project… I needed a photobooth for my wedding (this was one of my few assigned wedding tasks!). You know, one of those ‘take a few photos of guests, and print them’ sort of thing, like the early film ones . Early on, I built up a list of things I really wanted to achieve with it, as there are many options... Categories Entertainment/Photography/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
January 27, 2016 How I manage and share 1000s of digital photographs People often ask me for the best way to store their thousands of photos, and I’ve tried a bunch of ways in the past. I take masses of photos (SLRs, Action Cams, Pocket Cams and phones), and running my own commercial (colocated) server has allowed me to use applications such as Gallery, Piwigo and other server apps to store, manage and display... Categories DIY/Photography/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
June 10, 2015 How about some Raspberry Pi The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. There are lots of different things you can... Categories DIY/Education/Projects/Technology/Weather Comments: 0
March 3, 2015 Tips to create easy Tag Cloud Artwork You’ve seen them… those pictures made up of lots of words. You can create these pretty easily at Tagxedo, but it is handy to have a few tips as to how to get the best out of it. They make great family presents, and you can use all the words that are personal & meaningful to the person you are... Categories Education/Entertainment/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
March 10, 2014 You need a Zombie Apocalypse Kit I must admit I was once a Boy Scout… and tend to like to be prepared for stuff. Sometimes more than I really need to be! Ok, I haven’t yet seen a Zombie (except for my son on Halloween) but there have been a number of Earthquakes in Christchurch New Zealand, and the fact that there are over 50 Volcanoes... Categories DIY/Opinion/Projects/Technology Comments: 0
