A while ago I made a little notify thingy using an LCD display, LED, button and a buzzer.
V1V2
Some friends of mine made one also, and today I was talking to a new guy. I could not find this project on my site .. again .. so I’ll post it now.
Some things it does right now
Front door opens
Door bell rings (because my lab is in the garden)
Girlfriend is 10Km away, so let’s start cooking
Garage door opens (friend of mine uses this to know when kids arrive)
More .. because it’s very easy to customize in Home Assistant
Doorbell pressed: Led starts blinking, backlight LCD enabled, text displayed on LCD, Buzzer sounds (or plays a RTTTL ringtone) LCD backlight on and buzzer beep until acknowledge button pressed.
Heating for brewing: temperature on display, led on when temperature reached. Press acknowledge to start timer.
I bought 4x Xiao-S3 mini controllers. I want to place these all over my house to scan for Bluetooth and Wifi Clients. So I can do a location search for Mobile Phones, Keys and more.
Also the Bluetooth tags I used for the Scanner Game can be used!
I want to post a location to Home Assistant, But I also played with 3D view.
Using MQTT I can subscribe to the topic locator/scanner1/ble or locator/scanner1/wifi_clients
Problems I ran into.
Too many duplicates, fixed. Can not scan Wifi when connected, so I connect every 30s. Could not find all wifi clients, needed to scan all channels!
Not happy with the performance, I bought a Nano-VNA. (Vector network analyser)
Looks like 915 Mhz antenna
Due to the many options, I was lost at first. Maybe I have to ask Bigred. Calibrating I get now, but I can’t easily calibrate an antenna with fixed cable.
Much to learn, but that’s what I want. 🙂
I bought a VNA/Antenna test board from Ali.
Feature:
RF Demo Kit RF test board demo calibration board for learning Vector Analyzer and Antenna Analyzer test calibration.
The board is fully integrated with 18 functional modules.
Equipped with 2 UFL patch cords for convenient use.
Each module is carefully selected for high quality and reliability.
The board is small and lightweight, easy to carry.
Specification:
Product type: RF Demo Kit
Filters:
A. Short low-pass filter (LPF): 30 MHz
B. FM high-pass filter (HPF): 100 MHz
C. Commonly used SAW band-pass filter (BPF): 433 MHz
D. Video ceramic notch (band-stop filter, BSF): 6.5 MHz
We went to WHY2025 a hackers camp in the Netherlands.
The first time I went was in 1997, with Bigred. Many followed after that. Tyrone, Bigred were also there from our old Crew. Coline joined me several times since 2005.
I joined the Badge team, and was making spacers for the Badges in bulk using my 3D printer. Also made some fancy cases.
CasesSpacers
In case of doubt .. more leds!
Our campsite with 7m Led stringMust have more leds!
Nice weather, good friends. New friends. Booze. Food and Hacking. We visited a lot of talks and enjoyed the music. (And fire)
I worked on: RSS feed on a epaper display, Midi monitor and the MQTT Pong website.
RSS Feed display
While waiting in line for the Badge:
A stone was passed from behind! It was a ping request. We passed it forward, and 15 minutes later a TTL time exceeded stone came from the front of the line. You gotta love those nerds!
Some other stones
The Badge: This should have got much potential .. Many misses, much to learn.
I bought Peterson’s Vogelgids, just for fun. It’s an old version, but that’s on purpose.
Then I saw a little project named BirdNet Pi. (I used the Android app already)
This is a Raspberry installation which recognises bird sounds. And gives you statistics about the detected birds. Cool for identifying birds in my garden.