So I finally received my C.H.I.P, and over the break I purchased myself some flic bluetooth buttons with the plan of making some nice push buttons around the home to control openhab. This idea mostly came from usablity/speed of use of openhab. Having the dashboard in the middle of the house is a nice idea, but if you are in another room, without your phone there isn’t too much you can do without having to go to this dashboard to interact with openhab. Read more

Since the ninjablock company has run out of money, and is not supporting the ninjablock anymore, and its cloud service is pretty unreliable (at the best of times) I decided to merge all my homeautomation items with Openhab. At the time I adopted this, it was the only major, multi-vendor supported Home automation “brain” around. Since then home assistant has come around, and alot of others have picked up support for alot more “things”. Read more

So I was too late to the hype of Pi Zero, the $5 Raspberry pi, and have not been able to get my hands on one since the launch. Everywhere has been sold out everytime I check :( I can’t remember how I stumble upon them, but I found an equaly as awesome project on kickstarter. C.H.I.P. A $9 board that runs linux. Esentially the same specs as the PiZero, CHIP also includes onboard wifi and BlueTooth 4. Read more

So I was inspired yesterday to create a bash script in which I can control my limitlessLED lights from my raspberry pi (cli). I always have a ssh connection open to my pi while at work, and when I’m at home I always have a terminal windows open, and tinkering around. So I though, why not? It’s still a work in progress at the moment, but basic functionality is there for now :) Read more

This one’s a bit off topic.. But from my last post, about LimitlessLED’s. The android app that they tell you to use from the play store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lierda.wificontroller&hl=en) is functional, but terribly slow at starting up, and giving you access to your light. More often then not, my wife an I would find ourselves just using the physical light switch instead. So Finally I found a pretty awesome app for controlling LED lights, (https://play. Read more

My next major purchase was a Ninja Block for the Raspberry pi. I bought this ages ago, but never got around to writing about it! http://shop.ninjablocks.com/pages/picrust I thought this was cool as it was a low cost way to start my home automation projects, and it is definitely marketed at the hobbiest, and I would not recommend this one for commercial use. Check out there NinjaSphere, which is aimed at plug n play users. Read more