Collin de Witt - A Bug's Life (Page 2)

A Bug's Life

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Collin de Witt

Diy Home Office Desk

With world that changed in 2020 and most people working from home, I needed to create a work space I could enjoy as I would spend a lot of my time there. After March 2020, I decided to convert one room into an office, which needed custom furniture. I have

Doorbell with a twist

In a previous post original doorbell [https://blog.abugslife.co.za/a-smarter-doorbell/] I wrote about a standard doorbell that I modified and added a controller to. Currently that one just reads indoor temperatures for me, but will be reworked for something else. This is the joy of DIY smart home

Light Notifications

If it ain't broke don't fix it. My My OpenHAB code style automations work for me, for the most part, and when something works I leave it alone, but with time I have been moving my automations into NODE-RED, a very powerful piece of automation software.

Night Lights For The Dogs

For human use as well After moving into our new home a while ago I had to add a Doggy door to the back door for the dogs to come and go as they please. From the old house we managed to train them to go out and "do

Presence detection

Simple yet cool to have Another recent addition to my home system is the ability to detect the presence of people. There are many ways to achieve this, as a start I went for the simplest, but the beauty of it, is that you can expand on how you determine

Outdoor Automations

Smart Swimming Pool So this was more work than expected, but the end result is really cool. So in order to get my pool onto the home automation system, it needed some electrical work, just to satisfy the OCD factor. Rewiring the pool into an outdoor DB board (Which took

Kitchen Temperature Monitoring

Adding the DHT22 Sensor So as per my doorbell post, I mentioned I would be adding a temperature and humidity sensor as well. Since my doorbell unit sits on a shelf in the Kitchen I thought it would be great to be able to monitor the ambient temperature and relative

My Personal Fairy Tale

My Personal Fairy Tale

Setting the scene This is a relationship/acquaintance that started out in around 1991. I was about 6 years old, and my second year of grade one. I had this girl in my class. She was in my class from then on through out my our school career. Around grade

Smarter Old Doorbell

Inspired by some stuff online, I decided to make my own smart-ish doorbell. You can buy these for a few grand, but I paid about R200 for a normal wirelss doorbell. Got home and started to "Frankenstein" the product. I opened up the plastic housing, and using a

Dumb Blinds to Smart Blinds

Here is a useful one, to simplify the mundane repetitive tasks in everyday life. Since opening and closing the kitchen blind is such strenuous work - The engineering (lazy) side in me decided to create a solution to mitigate possible self injury :) during this activity. Here is how I went

Somewhat Automated Dog Feeder

So this was my first arduino + ESP8266 project. Also my first attempt and making my own PCB and learning to solder. This project must have been the one to get the most attention from guests. If people come over or hear about it, it seems to intrigue people more that

Irrigation Automation

So finally I have completed my irrigation set up. This one tested a variety of my skills, Plumbing, electrical, manual labour :) and of course the coding and electronics :) I might still change this in the future to run on Tasmota, but I enjoy writing code, and for this one I

Our Furry Children

When my wife came into my life, she brought some baggage with her. Like most people we all have baggage... mmm but this is awesome baggage :) These are our two fury children. Charlie and Blitz. Two sausages that we can not live with out. Loyal, loving, funny and so much

Automated Reminders

I have lots of automation rules set up in my OpenHAB system, but I thought I would share this one now. A Small and simple, but handy rule. In the OpenHAB rules file, I created a reminder to take the bin out on Sunday's as they collect trash

Smart Lights

So since most people start automation in the home with the most used thing - LIGHTS. My first automation post will be about my lights. So in my previous house, I did not want to fiddle with the house wiring, so I added 12 volt LED strip in every room,

My First Blog Post

So I have been trying to increase my skill set, and instead of just java, I have been trying to learn new skills, and started tinkering with Docker and containers and such. I thought I would host my own blog using this... and here I am. So I looked at