1 Technophile

 After more than 4 years spent in home automation, the thing that bothered me the most was the regular failure of my Pi SD cards. These failures were the consequences of power supply issues and too much IO on the SD card. I could have tried to reduce the IO or to buy a better model of SD card. With a home automation system, you need something that is available when you need it. Not something that stops in the middle of your holidays. So here are the results of my recommendations: For the storage, it is now well known that the SD Card on the PI is subject to corruption, to avoid that you can put your system in read-only mode, try to reduce the writing, or install an SSD. The raspberry pi 4b can now also boot from the SSD. I choose this solution as I wanted to keep the DB on the Pi. For the UPS, I had the occasion to test several Power Bank without satisfaction. Indeed if the power bank you are using doesn't have a pass-through mode, you have a risk that the bank will stop at an unex...

For this new post we will make it compatible with OpenMQTTGateway ; the BAKEEY IR remote on banggood or AVATTO S06 on Aliexpress (the links are affiliated). Note that this article apply only to the non tuya compatible S06 models. The newest models, marked as tuya compatible are not based on ESP so not compatible with OMG. From this discussion on Home Assistant forum, I have deducted that the AVATTO gateways may be uploaded with new firmware, so I bought 2 of them. Thanks to their pinout information I was able to quickly get this device up and running with OMG. Overview The S06 is a compact IR bridge with FCC, CE, and RoHS marks,you can find it for less than 15$. Here are some photos: Disassembly It is not so easy to open, you will need a thin plate, insert it on the junction between the two box parts and do a lever effect at several locations. We can see inside that the microcontroller is a TYWE3S, the FCC datasheet   gives us plenty of information: ESP8266 1mb flash 50K RAM So we...

I had the chance to test the sonoff micro (product given by itead), this device is an USB connected switch. You can control it from the Ewelink app and by the way power ON or OFF your USB devices. You can also program the start or the stop. It can answer several use cases: Restart your raspberry pi <4 if you are not at your home from a third party application Restart your ESP or Arduino Cut your smartphone power when it is charged Switch on or off devices powered by USB (mini lamp, mini fans...) The device is tiny but nevertheless be carefull it will not fit on all USB port environments. The button enable to power it on or off without smartphone and to put into pairing mode. The interesting stuff comes here, the device is rated for 5V 2.5A, it doesn't support Quick charge or power supply >5V. We see that the device support 2.4Ghz wifi as the other sonoff devices. If we check the current consumption without device we can see that...