automation - A Bug's Life

A Bug's Life

Sign in Subscribe

automation

Home automation stuff

DIY Smart Doorbell with LCD

DIY Smart Doorbell with LCD

In the age of smart homes and DIY electronics, creating a personalized smart doorbell can be a rewarding project that combines functionality and creativity. In this blog post, I will show the process of building this smart doorbell using a 16x2 LCD, a 3D printed enclosure, and some nifty home

DIY Loadshedding Lights

DIY Loadshedding Lights

Since loadshedding is here to stay, and installing solar and battery backups on the house is just way out of most people budgets. I decided to make my own affordable diy system to have lights during power outages. Better than having rechargable laps to carry around the house, I opted

Keypad Controller

A problem I faced after moving into this house, was the back garage door that leads to the garden. The door has a motor, but there is no remote, only a button inside the garage. Everytime I needed something in the garage while I was in the garden, I would

More Presence Detection

Adding to my presence detection [https://blog.abugslife.co.za/presence-detection/] this is another way to somewhat advance the process of knowing who is home and who not. Apart from monitoring GPS or smart devices connected to the home network. This is an additional way to increase the sources of

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

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

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,