Home Automation Hangout 2020-12-20

[Music] grace [Music] good morning superhumans uh i acknowledge the traditional owners of this land i pay my respects to their elders past and present and to aboriginal elders and peoples from other communities who may be taking part in this live stream today so today you can see a bit of activity behind me oh he's put a mask on um so we're leading up to the uh to linuxconf and the open hardware mini conf which is going to be january 23 to 25 i believe and uh so we've got a fair bit of work to get ready for that we've got a whole lot of conference badges and i've shown conference pages on previous live streams so here's one that failed testing but we still have i think 100 that need flashing and so andy is here setting up a laptop so that he can go through and flash a whole bunch of them and astra is here too hang on let's see if we can see astra oh no she just went off the other direction that's true come over here is she on camera no you're not quite a bit closer come here come on she doesn't know what's going on oh you can just see your nose on camera there you go look there you can see astra so astra is here to keep us company as well what is that oh look hang on hang on i gotta get out of the field of view what she's astra is chasing something i think she might be chasing a squirrel yes and this is a special squirrel because it's um it's had one of seon's boards the um the tiny pico oh thank you so this is a a work in progress something that andy has been doing for a little while it's very appropriate for this channel so we've got a squirrel it's got rgb leds for its eyes and he's found an appropriate place to shove a tiny picot so the idea is that this squirrel is going to probably be linked to something that monitors the live stream chat hello no this this one is not for you um and in a similar way to the script that did the party poppers thing we could have the little squirrel react so that's a cool work in progress uh so yes ceon i know i've been slacking around all week i've still got a hundred that need flashing it's uh i've been getting through them but it is quite a pro hypno squirrel yes that would be called little eyes so yeah it is quite a process getting through doing the flashing so there there was the assembly which was a whole big thing in itself and that was distributed among a number of people which was fantastic so um pancake legend who is normally in the chat here and um john spencer who is also normally in the chat here i haven't seen either of them yet this morning they did a whole lot of the assembly soldering the displays onto the pcbs and that sort of thing but then after that they had to go through the testing process which we saw last week then they need to be flash with micropython and ico firmware that takes a couple of minutes per badge and so when you're doing hundreds of them something that takes a couple of minutes suddenly you've got a day of work in front of you so each of these little steps that might you might think oh that's easy it's only like two minutes to do that yeah and then you do it 300 times it's not such a little thing anymore any time that you can shave off each part of the process really scales out i i know you are kidding sion i know um i know you you know what it's like to do things yourself repetitively at scale doing lots and lots of boards you know that pain way too well uh something went ding what was that oh okay no that was just a message my uh my sister is currently in kuala lumpur where she's been living for the last few years and she is just about to move back to australia and uh now with my two nephews and her husband and uh so they've been a whole lot of messages this morning talking about arrangements for her coming back which is very cool alright so to talk today right near the end of the live stream there was a really interesting thing that came up and i can't remember who it was but someone asked what my plans were for next year in terms of projects and things i wanted to do and i want to put that call out again and see what you think you have in mind for yourself for next year if you've got projects that you want to finish off things you want to work on please chuck them in the chat because i would really like to know about it i think it's cool to hear about about things that other people are working on oh and also the uh now how can i do this um there is a project i've i've kind of referenced obliquely over time and never really revealed because i wasn't ready to and i'm still not ready to but last night there was a thing on twitter where uh so i was yesterday i was vacuuming actually i can't quite see it but the water cannon is just over it's behind andy just over there and it's currently in a horizontal position i was vacuuming yesterday so i was down there kind of near where astra is right now uh down on the floor with a vacuum cleaner um because i was trying to get the nozzle in and vacuum around those boxes and things and i smacked my head on the water cannon and i tweeted a picture of it which from that point of view was looking up and showing all of the boxes up on the shelves and someone who saw the picture realized that there are aruco codes other focus is just going to the background now so someone realized that there are aruco codes or markers on my plastic containers and asked about it so i yes we need some focus on this camera uh so i i don't know if i'm gonna be able to find this video actually i might end up wasting everybody's time while i'm doing this but uh yeah i ended up revealing a bit about the aruco codes and what they do more than i had been intending to do and if i can find this video i know it's on my phone but i don't know if it's on my computer i will show you uh a news photo trick zooming in on the screen on the back yes reveal my wi-fi details or something it's still focused on the background these something i've found is that these panasonic cameras have terrible autofocus terrible in a few ways firstly it picks the wrong thing to focus on and secondly once it does focus it kind of hunts around uh now where will i find this video uh so if i find it on my phone i might be able to transfer it this is going to be really gripping watching me find this so anyway i'll try to explain what it's all about while i'm doing this uh no not that one i want this one and i don't want to play come on pause where's pause pause okay and then i'm going to stick this in my dropbox so that i can find it and then i can play it and you can see it uh sure yes come on stick it in dropbox uh why is that not working i don't know all right i think i'm going to give up on that here is the tweet with your video okay so uh that is a better way to do it see on you are thinking and i'm not all right i'm gonna just pull up the tweet and do it that way notifications so what this is all about is finding stuff because um i've gone to a lot of trouble to set up set up a storage system in my lab where i've got lots of boxes and you can see in the background there there are these cardboard boxes these are the shipping boxes that are used for freetronix and super house and then you can see there are takeaway containers which are smaller ones here so i have five standard sizes of storage container there is there are little takeaway containers then the cardboard boxes then the plastic tubs which are up on my shelves and i think there are either seven and a half or ten liter then there are some larger flat boxes which i think are about 20 20 liter or 25 liter and then 50 liter storage containers so with those five sizes basically i can store different quantities of stuff now where is this thing okay i'll find this all right this is going to be super dodgy but let's see if this works i'm going to switch to my desktop so you can see the video can i full screen this out of here i don't know maybe and pause it take it back and i'll turn up the volume maybe you'll be able to see what's going on here i'm just going to play it it's only a few seconds long modules box isn't responding please check its network connection and power supply got to stop that all right uh back to here all right i have no idea whether you can see that properly or not because when i started playing it it went full screen i couldn't see obs i couldn't tell what was going on anyway so this is i hope that the easiest thing is i will just um stick where is it i can get the url for that particular tweet uh yeah anyway what i've got is a voice activated um a location system that uses aruco codes to track the location of all the boxes within the lab and what i can do is ask alexa where something is and it illuminates leds along the uh in fact let's um if i go back to here and this is just a hang on hang on here i want to go back to desktop view see this this is a total mess today i don't know what i'm doing all right you can see here in this picture and if i maybe if i zoom in you can see that this is a picture of the shelves over my bench and it's got all these containers on it and you can see that there is a strip here that's illuminated these leds lit up and that's because i had asked where a certain tub was located and you can see that each on each of these tubs there is a little marker it's like a it's a little bit like a qr code but it's not it's called an aruco code and it's used as a fiducial marker for things like augmented reality systems and it allows not just the id of the tag to be determined but also its coordinates and its pose so its orientation so what you can do if you have one of these in the field of view of a camera you can determine the x and y location within the field of view of the tag and you can also work out the rotation because it figure it factors in the distortion that it detects of the tag so you can have and a flat surface with a sticker on it and you can rotate it and you can get the um the rotation information out of it as well but at the moment what i'm doing is using it just for the x y positions and that's being returned and updated into a mariadb database and then when uh when i ask where something is it's looked up in the database and then it sends a command via mqtt to the notifier which in this case is a wemos d1 mini connected to these rgb led strips and it illuminates the leds in the location of the tag and the way i've got this set up at the moment is that there aren't even specific locations on this shelf it is based purely on the xy coordinates so i could shuffle all the boxes like half a spot to the left and the marker would still come out in the correct location because it's not like i've defined this is shelf slot one slot two slot three or anything like that there's nothing hard coded in it it's just and a range across x and it figures out oh this is where the tag is across x so illuminate those leds so i could put those containers anywhere and the illumination would still come out in the correct location anyway i'm going to do a video about that and uh but not now so have you actual size all right let's get rid of that and that and come back to here where my camera still hasn't focused let's see if we can get some focus is it going to i'll move in and out no it's totally gone oh well now what suggestions have we got what are people working on for next year what are your goals i want to hear more about it and um oh okay so ceo asked why did i choose those code types instead of qr all right so the the primary reason is that with sorry andy i didn't mean to interrupt you um so the main reason that i chose that particular type of tag is that it returns not just not just the id but the xy coordinates and the system is specifically designed for that purpose you can think of it as being kind of like a type of qr code that has been optimized for multiple tags to be visible in the field of view and to not have any ambiguity there are a whole lot of attributes about aruco codes that give them advantages in this application compared to regular qr codes so with a normal qr code the general use case is that you have a single tag or a code in the field of view i mean you might have a few you might have two or three for example if you've got a box with some shipping information on it and it's got a few qr codes on it you can scan them and you can generally return all of the qr codes in the field of view but the problem is that a qr code is a generalized um uh it's a generalized system and it's designed for high information density which makes it not so good when you've got a tag that is this big and you're trying to read it from four meters away or three meters away and you've got a hundred of them in the field of view so one of the things that the aruco codes do is that they specifically they're specifically designed to have as little ambiguity as possible so with something like a qr code if you imagine a okay just think about a regular barcode so just a series of lines it's like a binary representation of a number or a set of ascii characters and and with many types of barcode you can actually just generate you can generate them using fonts there's usually a checksum but you can you can literally take like an ascii character and get the chunk of a barcode that represents that character and then you just string them all together and you build yourself a barcode and then you put a check sum on the end and you're done with uh if you've got say two binary numbers and they differ because there is a digit in one position that is in you know say the third bit is a one in one of them and the fourth bit is a one in the other so it's only offset by one those two codes are going to be very similar and they are only going to vary in a fairly small part of the barcode whereas with the with aruco codes when the dictionary is generated it specifically uh generates them in a way that is has the least similarity as possible so that you have less false readings if you get a false reading you're not necessarily going to get like if you get a false rating you might get one bit that is wrong that is not going to throw you onto an adjacent tag that is then going to return the wrong result it'll throw you onto an invalid tag that is in between all of the tags so it provides a bit of buffering and like a safety margin so it can handle errors it's better to get an invalid result that doesn't map to any known tag because then you've got a known error rather than getting an invalid result that maps onto an incorrect tag because then you get a false positive coming back and they're also designed so that they can be rotated and the angle can be determined so with a when you scan an eruko tag you get back the id of the tag just like a qr code but you also get its x and y position you get its angle of orientation and you get you can get depending on how much you extract out of it you can also get the pose so you can say it is at this orientation it is rotated 23 degrees to the right and it is angled away from me by 17 degrees so you can then use that information to do things like overlay augmented reality visualizations onto the video stream that is processing the tags uh yeah cool um and what is showing up on andy screen oh is there anything confidential on andy's screen i hope not i didn't even realize that andy screen was visible in the live stream uh yeah i am very fuzzy because [Music] lots of reasons um so uh yeah all right uh mike o'connor i had a great question does anyone know if it has motor moisture sensor um [Music] moisture sensors are not something that are all that common not like temperature sensors tasmota would definitely support it because typically with a moisture sensor what you get back is a value based on a usually a resistance or a capacitance on the sensor so if you can read like tasmato can read analog inputs so i expect that you could probably read from a moisture sensor without any trouble it would um uh yeah but that's a good question if anyone has specifically done that and knows of that please stick it in the comments ah so it's leak detection yeah um that yeah there are there are leak detectors around and i'm pretty sure that i've seen people put tasmota on them so there are uh just trying to think about what there is hmm yeah i i can't specifically think of something i can link you to right now but that sounds like a reasonably easily solvable problem mike hmm all right um andy suggested holt andy dix suggested holding the hand close to the camera to get it to focus and then it might refocus oh it has refocused in the meantime now what i can do is take it out of auto focus mode the problem is here's the catch as i lean towards the camera to reach it because it's a fair way from me at the moment it'll refocus at the closer distance and then i'm going to see if i can reach it to turn off autofocus uh and now if i move back i'm probably oh no i'm still in focus that rabbit he is perfect uh yeah oh so frank said vegetronic sells a moisture sensor which gives zero to three volts yeah and you could feed that into an analog input onto something like a d1 mini running tasmota that would work just fine uh yeah okay cool unexpected make i said um i just took a real pla filament that has been left to the open air for almost three months and dried in my toaster for two hours two hours and now i'm printing with it and it's printing perfectly cool so yesterday ceon released an update to his reflow master which is his retrofit controller for toaster ovens to turn them into reflow ovens for surface mount soldering and the new version now has a bake feature which is really really cool so baking is when you bring the temperature of the oven up and then just hold it for an extended period of time but it's not to make it hot enough for soldering the idea is that you use it for drying things out and the common applications for that are things like drying out printer filament so what you can do is put the filament in the oven take it up to say 60 degrees or whatever the number is and then just hold it there for a couple of hours and that dries the filament out any moisture that is absorbed will will boil out of it will evaporate out of it and then you've got nice dry filament again but it's also really useful for things like ws2812 leds and i've had this problem in the past there are some types of devices like ws2812s which have got and i think the reason that they're particularly susceptible to it is that they have that clear material i think it's kind of like an epoxy that sits over the top so you've got the the little bond wires inside the led which are what emit the illumination and then there is the clear over the top of it which is like a it's a kind of like a glue that gets squirted into the led so that clear little dome section over the front is a material that over time can absorb moisture and the problem is that if your reels of leds haven't been stored in a moisture controlled environment and then you put them into a reflow oven they can crack and explode and do all sorts of things because the moisture that is inside that's been absorbed into it uh heats up very rapidly and expands and then it can destroy your leds and i've actually had this happen where i've had ws2812s that i've had in storage for a while like they might have been sitting in a box for a year or a couple of years they've absorbed moisture over time and then you reflow them and all your boards are ruined so something that you can do is put the reel of leds into an oven to bake them and because you're heating them up you're not making it really hot you're just bringing it up to like a higher temperature than normal for an extended period of time it doesn't make the moisture in them boil it just makes it sort of evaporate and it comes out and that way you can dry them out and then when you put them on the board run them through the reflow oven it all works perfectly yeah as peter said gas in the led yeah you don't want that makes them go pop so if you have a um if you have one of seon's reflow masters go and check out the new firmware because it adds that feature which is very cool that's a really useful thing i don't have a reflow master i've got a toaster oven which i set up i think it must be nearly 10 years ago now for doing reflow and i just used initially i was just doing it by hand so what i did was put a thermocouple in the back of it and i would sit there and watch it and i was being a human pid controller and i would control the power and just turn it on and off and try to hold the target temperature so i did that a few times and it was really frustrating and i ended up putting in one of the little rocket screen uh reflow controller boards so i've got an arduino with a rocket screen shield on it which has got the input from the thermocouple and it controls the power and then i run a pid system on it and that ended up being my main reflow system for must've been about six or seven years and then i ended up getting that uh the much bigger reflow oven which is through that through that door there now it's all been moved in there and uh my old toaster oven with its pid controller is currently in a cupboard in the garage but what i really should do is drag it back out and put a reflow master on it and um yeah use it for baking because i've got a whole bunch of filament as you can you can see there's filament up here these are all boxes of filament above my 3d printer and there are more rolls of it which you can't quite see oh yes you can see just everything is backwards there so there are rolls of filament in the lower enclosure so that's got clear plastic over the front of it that's actually enclosed it looks like it's just an open area but it's an enclosed thing and that little black thing you can see there is a temperature and humidity sensor and there's another one up there it's a temperature and humidity sensor in the top enclosure but yeah being able to bake filament would probably be a good thing all right oh robin yes so you have a voice controlled uh locating system as well yeah if you've got someone else that knows where everything is that's easy just ask them uh oh yes you know what andy really needs is a balaclava because yeah someone just said you look like elite hacker sitting there with your two computers and all your terminals open you've got a mask on but it needs to be a balaclava yeah yeah that's that's better yeah he's just hacking the pentagon and yes so um if you've got a mobile camera might be able to show something sort of just a few seconds about the other week oh okay mobile camera so someone asked a question what was the question just while i'm getting this camera ready all right i'm going to i'm just getting out my laptop no not my laptop my phone because i'm going to switch to mobile camera if i turn it this way all right andy needs a minute to set it up but what i'm going to do is switch to my uh my phone as a camera so that i can show you something that andy's got on his laptop uh dodgy um yeah so that's how biden won the election uh no let's not get into that conversation i really do not want to touch on that area um yes all right hang on i'm just going to switch to what have i got from where my portable let's see if we get video coming through all right i've got a portable camera this is just backing up so that of course it doesn't have to be difficult to crash just when they come in all right all right and i'm just showing the little squirrels in here looking at the thing oh this is just absolutely disastrous oh no that's true that's just not something that is image you can just see that pretty clearly uh i think so yep so that was something that was awesome i don't know how clearly that was coming through but if you look up the top of the screen you can see in the yellow x it says prediction what's happening here is that the video feed is being processed by a machine learning system and it's reading the sign language that andy is doing and poorly and reading it poorly i'm reading it no you're doing it is that what you're saying yes um yeah and he's probably doing sign language with a hearing accent and so yeah you can see crying uh communicate catch also having a cat is the cat symbol yep so it's um it is someone's asking if it was possible yeah so someone was asking if it was possible to read you know i've got no indication of what's happening on the phone other than looking back at the screen so someone recently was asking if it's possible to read sign language and interpret it and yeah that's a little demonstration of doing that so i'm going to switch back to the other camera jump out of here uh yeah so sometime what would be really cool would be to have andy here on the live stream when uh when he's not busy occupied doing something like this because i'm doing a quick mental calculation here of how much i'm allowed to say and you can tell me if i'm not basically andy works for a company that does machine learning and they build really cool things for uh for a variety of clients and so yeah there are all sorts of things that uh that we could talk about or that andy could talk about that i'm sure would be super interesting but um we need to do that in a scenario where he can actually sit and talk to you and explain stuff yeah see on yeah not so much a guest spot it was more that we were just trying to figure out a schedule when andy could come over and do some flashing and of course what's happening is i'm sitting here doing no flashing at all so i'm being no help whatsoever and andy is there working away doing what um i really should be doing uh so think help said is that opencv i guess that was a question for andy in relation to the gesture recognition not just your recognition the um the sign language recognition no it's a new a neural network and it's a neural network yeah so there is a video um there is a video stream going into a neural network and it is running a model that has been trained on a whole bunch of of data so that it has learned how to recognize the different gestures yeah yeah ross said is he writing python in vim what a goddamn madman uh yes so yes writing uh in vi actually i think um old school yeah old school it's not even vim it's by and uh with syntax highlighting turned off with green on black for total lateness yes that's that's the way andy works um yeah the i've become so dependent on syntax highlighting that when i look at andy's terminals and it's all just green on black um i i start having trouble figuring out where things end and for me personally it makes it harder to spot things like syntax errors because the um peter no we're not going to go ed um i've had enough of it way back in the early days was that tico pico tico yes um i used to use pico don't i don't know about tico ah yeah all right so anyway my point was andy is the guy who got me onto mqtt in the first place and that would be it must be about 11 years ago it was shortly we first met at lca in hobart which i think was 2009. give or take uh well linux conf a you hobart what year was that it was the year that um 2009 in tasmania 2009 yeah on the ferry yeah so it was the year that and um that hugh blamings and i did a uh did a tutorial on hardware hacking for software developers and we talked a bit about the arduino and the various other things and andy was there at the conference and that was how we met and we've been great friends ever since so shortly after that conference it would have been i'm not sure how long after but not all that long after andy was telling me about this fantastic thing called mqtt so it must have been sort of mid-2009-ish at a guess and he came over and helped me set up my very first mosquito installation and i've been running mqtt ever since so uh yeah all my ram blings about mqtt over the years you have andy to blame for it yeah so peter lola editing three lines of m4 in ed one week of my life i'll never get back yes all right um where are we at it feels like i've just been talking randomly this whole time i don't even know what i've been talking about so i guess this is just a regular live stream um alrighty so i still want some suggestions about uh or some things that people will talk about for what projects or what are your goals or what things do you want to do in 2021 because as andy just pointed out to me before i started this is actually the last live stream before christmas which is only a few days away less than a week away that's ridiculous and then i think i've got one live stream just before new year's but this is pretty much the end of 2020 so i want to know what 2021 is going to be for you uh yeah okay dodgy dodgy is my um my anchor he's bringing me back to the topic so bin location was the last topic before you went chasing squirrels yeah we need to get this little guy connected up to the chat so that it reacts any time someone says squirrel all right so oh um see ceon said go for 2021 expand the business and bring someone else on to help me before i burn myself out yeah that's the danger you um uh like seon has plenty of business experience he's done other things in the past and i'm sure he's um he's got lots of expertise in terms of the scaling but it's definitely um the very early stage when you're doing a bootstrapped thing like this so no external funding it's just start a business with some of your own funds and try to build it on revenue that initial stage of going from you yourself to you plus someone else helping you is a really big leap because all of a sudden you become responsible for someone else's income and if you have sales that are down or expenses or something for a couple of weeks you still have to pay their wages you can't just suck it up but you can if it's just you so yeah it's a it's a difficult thing to go through a difficult stage to go through and i kind of tried to grow through that with retronics and didn't really succeed and now freetronix is back to just me part-time hello astra hello um but that's okay because now i'm doing other things so ah oh we got some other suggestions um so yeah well ross said um unexpected maker dude you just need another pick and place runs yeah a whole chain of them so uh yeah oh this is dodgy has said everyone knows by now i'm hoping to build a new home automated house next year still at this late stage guessing what i want that to look like now this has led to some really interesting discussions on the super house discord because you know for a lot of us playing with home automation or you know just little projects that we're working on at home we're doing a retrofit or we're working with an existing system and so every now and then you go through that you know that what if the dream situation of imagine you were building a house from scratch and you could plan it the way you wanted to and pre-cable everything you wanted to do all of those sorts of things and so dodgy is in that situation at the moment and of course unless you've won tets lotto then you can't just go crazy and provision everything you have to be very careful about budget and how much do you spend on certain things and put in what you think you'll need but not over provision so and a lot of the time there'll be things that you want to do but that are just beyond the budget so it becomes a bit of a balancing act but yeah dodgy is in that position at the moment where he is currently planning to build a house and trying to work out what he can achieve within his available budget and it's a bit of a different situation to what a lot of people are in and so he's been talking about it on the super house discord and if you want to hear more about that and have some suggestions then please jump on to the discord in fact i will stick that link in so i don't think i've given this link recently let me see if i can type properly yeah so um [Music] yeah so don't you say tell me about it i've been designing the house in sketchup for the last four years waiting for the planets to align yeah uh oh gary had a question i'll get back to in just a second so um yeah the the journey that dodgy is on right now is a really interesting one to watch and this is an area where things like the super house community can get involved and uh and provide suggestions and feedback and if you're interested in the sort of things that he's planning for his house please jump onto discord because he's done things like show show proposed floor plans and where wiring would go and things like that and thinking about this what um thinking about this in advance is interesting it's a nice little mental exercise all right so gary had a question which is uh when will the board for the advanced version of the air quality sensor be available that is actually moving back up the priority list now the air quality sensor was kind of stalling because i hadn't got through that episode about setting up the software stack and so i've got a one of those plastic tubs up there at the moment is the prototypes for the pro version oh let me just reach up and grab that um so right here i have my air quality center thing which has got no qr code on it so i can't locate this box except the old-fashioned way and i have some prototypes oh lots of prototypes of the new version i'll show you a couple of them i've been through a couple of iterations of this already so this was the pro version of the air quality sensor and you can see it's got four rgb leds on it let me check this over here go to the overhead camera overhead all right and get some zoom happening here we go ah better much better now you can kind of see what's going on so this all goes into a 3d printed enclosure so this is the front part of the enclosure and the reason that there's double-sided tape on there and a header here is that there is a color lcd that goes on the front let me see if i can find a oh and there's another revision of it and as you can see it's got a bodge wire on there so even that's not final and you can see i've patched a crystal in there there are quite a few differences between these two boards they're physically the same outline but there are many differences between them oh here's a display okay so this is a it's a 240 by 240 color display and that goes onto the front like that and there's an esp32 there's a room 32 module on the back and i've got all of the pin out there documented and this goes into the enclosure not even sure if this is the right version of the enclosure for this board it looks like it might be so that's the front part of the enclosure and you can see the display on the front there there's a mode switch that pokes through the back part of the enclosure where is it well here's one of the backs and i'll drop this around so that goes that drops into the enclosure there and it exposes that's a bme 680 just down the bottom there so that can be temperature humidity atmospheric pressure and it can detect the ocs so volatile organic compounds and this is the inlet and the outlet for the particulate matter sensor so it's a pms-7003 particular matter sensor display on the front and you can see that the mode switch comes through the back so that closes up and the whole thing looks it looks kind of neat so the idea is that that can sit well you're looking straight down on it but imagine that you're looking horizontally this could sit on a shelf or something it looks big on screen here but the whole thing is actually quite small and so you can display the air quality on the just on the front there and it can also report via wi-fi you know so you can you're pushing the values to mqtt there's usbc on the side there now looking at it like this it looks basically done and in fact this unit does function but it had a few problems so i ended up revising the design i rethought what i was going to do with it and this one i can't even remember what chip i think this one had a cp-2102n as the us better serial converter on it and there were a couple of issues with pin outs i think um you can't really see it on here but there are some tracks just there that are cut there's a little white mark that you can see just next to my finger that's where i've cut some tracks i had to reallocate a few pins and then i did this version and once again the display goes over the front so that sits on like that and i think this fits into the same case because everything is in the same location and i temper i made a really big mistake here this was a stupid thing to do with this revision i switched to a ch340g as a usb serial converter and i hated it i've used them in the past and i'd forgotten how much i hate them so i put i switched it onto this board while i was making other changes and uh regretted it so i'm going back to the cp2102n you can see i've also reduced the leds now the reason for these are the the point of these leds let's try powering one of these up i have no memory whatsoever of what state these are in like in terms of their software or what they are doing i don't know if they're functional so let's plug one in and see what happens so the point of the leds initially i think is to display boot up status while they are red at the moment it's not showing up properly on the camera oh now they've gone green oh hang on i've had that plugged into the wrong point yeah they're green so that means it's now connected to wi-fi and then i think green means it's also on mqtt i can't remember the sequence and so that it's not displaying anything on the lcd which is interesting so the firmware on this is obviously not doing what it's meant to but the idea is that that green so if i put this cover over it it doesn't show up too well on camera but the enclosure is actually glowing green through right through the case so this is just radio printed in white what is this i think it's petg and the leds glow through it so what i wanted to be able to do was have the whole thing change color so that normally it would the leds would be off and then if it detected anything that was hazardous like the um levels of something in the air that are a bit of a pain a bit of a problem you could do something like glow red and you wouldn't necessarily just have to look at the screen you can see the whole thing is glowing red and then you know you need to pay attention to whatever is going on and i put two leds on it to start with and then i discovered i didn't really need two leds i could just get away with one on each side i think it probably looks better with two leds but it's not necessary let's power up this one and see if this one's any more functional so yeah i revised the design i switched the usb to serial converter i dropped a couple of leds i think i changed the pin out on the esp flashing header i can't remember it was around the time that i was uh revising the header pin out so anyway this one let's power it up and see what happens we've got nothing on the leds and we've got nothing on the lcd so who knows what software is running on this and yeah you can see a few more barge wires there this is a connection coming off the particular matter sensor so i need to do another revision of the pcb to remove all of those and to fix whatever the other problems are and also to get rid of that stupid ch340g that thing's horrible and go back to the cp2102n anyway the point of all of that was in response to gary's um comment oh sean said a cheaper component that adds cost in time and support and frustration is not a cheaper part a spot on that was basically the my brain misfired at some point and thought hey i'll put on a ch340g because they're cheap and they're easy to solder because they're psych they're not qfn and uh then but yes they're cheaper but they're not cheaper if you take into account all of the support time and everything else yeah um so um um oh dodgy said i find it really hard to get into the air quality sensor project it's not like we have a choice to breathe or not yeah that's true but what i found is that i suppose the reason that i was interested in it is i was curious to know what things in particular will um will impact air quality and part of that is driven by the fact that i've had sinus problems over the years and i wanted to try to remove anything from my environment that would trigger that so uh what i found is that having visibility of measurements is really useful it's one thing to think oh yeah my my 3d printer is putting out particles and so that's bad and my soldering iron is putting out particles so that's bad and then try to reduce them but it's like if you don't actually measure it you don't know this comes i'm just repeating pancake legend again here to measure is to know if you're just guessing for example what really triggered this in me was the whole thing about 3d printers i had read a whole lot of people on twitter and elsewhere saying 3d printers emit micro particles that float around the air and are a health hazard because they're so small they go in through your lungs and end up in your bloodstream etc and i've seen quite a few people saying that and it sounds totally plausible so i thought well let's measure it and find out so that's what really prompted me in the first place to start looking into particular matter sensors and uh what the reason that i got the first the pms-5003 and then the 7003 laser scattering sensors because i wanted to see for myself if it was real and um the upshot of all of that is that i and that is actually the reason up there i know this is very small so you can't really see it let's go back to this camera uh come on come on obs you can switch no it's decided it doesn't want to switch cameras all right so just inside the enclosure right there it's actually stuck up with doubles like with self-adhesive velcro on the inside of the 3d printer enclosure is a particular matter sensor and the reason that i put it in there physically inside the enclosure right over the 3d printer it's within you know 25 centimeters of the print head as it's working was that i wanted to see if there were particles coming off the printer and the short answer is no well not that we can detect with one of these laser scattering sensors which detects particles down in the sub 0.3 micron range so it can read really small it can detect very small particles and with the sensor right there next to the printer i can run the printer and the particular matter sensor doesn't even blip it just shows the general level of particles in the air so there's always something there are you know there is pollen and stuff like that which it detects but you don't see any change from the regular background baseline when the 3d printer runs but just to show how sensitive it is you can see how far away that is that's in the far corner of the room it's not a big room but it's still a few meters away that particular matter sensor is inside the printer enclosure so that it's got clear sides on it there are little air gaps a couple of millimeters around the enclosure but it's basically in an enclosure if i turn on my soldering iron here at the bench within a minute or two we will start getting readings coming back from that particular matter sensor saying that the like the sub 0.3 micron range is tripled or quadrupled it's not just you know a little increase you can see the chart goes like this and all of a sudden it's straight up so i found that really interesting because my primary focus had been on particles coming from the 3d printer it didn't even really cross my mind that there would be stuff coming from the soldering iron now i know that when you solder obviously there's smoke and stuff but in my head i kind of equated that more to just gas rather than particles and the fact that the particulate matter sensor detects the soldering iron within a couple of minutes of it being turned on it shows just how much is coming off the soldering iron so anyway the point of all of this is because i've measured this i haven't just guessed and gone on second-hand information i have taken my focus from caring about particulate matter coming off the 3d printer and i've discovered i don't have to care about that so things like ventilating that to outside or putting a filter on it or whatever i know i don't have to care instead i have to care about what's happening with the soldering iron because that really is having an effect and i need to make sure that i'm conscientious about running the exhaust system when i'm soldering and making sure that i'm not spending time breathing those things in and the thing is that in the past i've been really blase about that and now i know that i shouldn't be the fact that i'm measuring this means that i now know where the real issue is i'm not just guessing which is cool um yes sawdust that's a really bad one and that sets me off so ross flamingo said yes all this can stuff you up real bad i've made who worked at a cnc cabinetry making place and the stories of the old guys there who never used ppe is scary yeah that is one of the things that has set me off in the past in particular circular saw with mdf it creates really small particles and that has caused me really big problems in the past so i've become really paranoid about about cutting mdf in particular because uh firstly mdf is originally made from uh from sawdust it's basically compacted sawdust that's been glued together and secondly it's got the glue in it so when you cut it you'll end up with microfine particles of sawdust and glue just floating around and you're breathing it in and for me that has a terrible effect on my sinuses so i can end up sick for days and days after after cutting some mdf with a circular saw unless i'm really careful with it yeah um yeah doji said mdf is a really is really bad utility chemicals i'm someone who should be monitoring the air currently operating in the ignorance is bliss mode yeah that can be tempting uh but i just found it really interesting anyway gary's original question was a simple one which is when are the new circuit boards going to be available and i still haven't answered that question because i've been chasing all these other squirrels so all right what i need to do is take this and apply the fixes from it and put it in to and fabricate them basically build a few and then i will be able to do it so i'm since the last video came out the one about data logging and grafana and all that sort of stuff i have decided to switch the last two videos in the air quality sensor mini-series originally what i was going to do was the next video would be about um building a reporting dashboard using grafana so the last video was more generalized it was just taking data from any kind of sensor storing it in flux and then charting it but what i want to do is a video about specifically creating an air quality dashboard and talking about how the reporting systems work for uh for different countries in fact i can find because i've already done a fair bit of preparation on this and i can show you a couple of the visuals that go with it and i'm already working on the firmware that does the calculation so where is it anyway what i'm going to do is switch it around so the reporting one is now going to be the last one in the series the next video is going to be the one about the pro which means that this is right near the top of the priority list right now and it's going to come out very soon so i'm just going to open up keynote because i use keynote for generating the uh where are we come on back to the desktop yes so uh i use keynote for making a lot of the the animations and things that i use in videos i find it's a really good way of just putting objects down on the screen making colorful tables and displaying information like this it's very easy to grab objects and move them around and snap them into alignment so yeah so the next video in the air quality sensor mini-series is going to be building one of these so it does not just the particular matter but it adds the volatile organic compounds and all of the other cool stuff and then the last one is going to be about this reporting and this that's what this preparation is for so this is the way the uk air quality index is calculated you can see that they have got a range of one to ten and there are these different parameters so basically this is kind of what i'm going to talk about in the video but if you look at for example each of these measurements so ozone in micrograms per cubic meter across an eight hour average nitrogen dioxide across a one hour average imagine that the numbers for ozone fall into this range of 67 to 100 and for nitrogen dioxide it falls into 135 to 200 etc and then here you've got the 2.5 micron particles in micrograms per cubic meter 24 hour average a range of 42-47 you can see that this is the highest reading out of all of these parameters so therefore what you do is you look across you take the highest reading and that is the index so i've now implemented this in the firmware i haven't pushed it to github yet but the firmware for the basic air quality sensor now implements the uk based air quality index reporting and so one of the parameters that comes back on both a a distinct mqtt topic and also in the json where it does the aggregated reporting with all its values just as a single json message that now in the next version of the firmware will include the uk air quality sensor like air quality index so in this case it would return a value of five and that is pretty simple because all you do is you find what range the readings fall into and then whichever one is in the highest value that's it like that's your air quality index the us system is much more complicated so the way it works is that there is a range for each of these readings and say your value fell into the 35 to 55 range on pm 2.5 say it was you know 40 or something what you do is you find which of these ranges it falls into and then you come across to the left and you look up and it's got 101 to 150 so you know the lower bound and the upper bound and you know the in terms of the index you know the lower bound and the upper bound in terms of the range and you know your current reading so let me find the part in the technical document so this is the actual us epa's guide to how the calculation works uh i'll just bring this out a bit bigger so it's easier to see so what you do is take where's the formula it's down here somewhere here it is so what you do is we've found the um the low and high values for the range that it's reading and we found off for the index and we found the low and the high for the particular range for the value and then you do this calculation and you end up with a number now this gives you the index so the air quality index for that one parameter so what you do is you apply this calculation for every one of the parameters and if i switch back to keynote here so what you do is you work across each of these things so ozone eight and one hour averages the particular matter carbon monoxide sulfur dioxide etc and for each of these you do this calculation and then that gives you a number so an index for each of the parameters and then you find which parameter has the highest index and then that is what your air quality index is for that set of readings anyway i think i explained that very badly i will try to do a proper explanation of that in a more rehearsed way when i do the video but the end result is that what you get out of the us-based system is a number typically between 0 and 500 whereas with the uk system you get a number between 1 and 10. so the uk system is much easier to calculate you just find the highest index and that's your number with the u.s system you get you get a more fine-grained report because you'll get a number where it says the current reading is 53 or something and then you know well 53 so it's just fallen into this yellow band here but it's only just into it it's not towards the upper end of the yellow band so with the us system it's much more finally graduated it's not just 10 um graduations it's 500 graduations but the process of getting to that calculation takes a little bit more so i have just just a couple of nights ago i started implementing the calculations in the firmware for the us air quality index system and that will be in the next thing i pushed to github i think for the firmware for the air quality sensor oh and also i fixed a bug there was a um a really stupid bug that i discovered where when i was creating the json message to report all of the values i actually had the 0.3 micron range particles per deciliter value being reported for both 0.3 and 0.5 so those two numbers always came out the same in the report even though they shouldn't be and it was because i had uh yeah it was a typo that i made in the in generating that json so i fixed that bug and i'm going to push that up as well so if you were taking the values of the individual topics so there's one mqtt topic for each of the readings the values were fine that was working perfectly but if you took the json where it combined all of the values and put them into a single message and then decoded it you would always get the same value for both 0.3 and 0.5 micron do you have numbers for eu so michael asked so that is a good one so what i'm intending to do for this video so this is not going to be the next video it's going to be the video after the next video wrapping up the air quality sensor series is going to be talking about these air quality indexes how you calculate them and then how to report those numbers using grafana and you know whatever tools you want to use i'm going to implement it in grafana using the value from both the the basic air quality sensor and the pro version of the air quality sensor so either of them will be able to do it it's just that the the pro version has the voc reading coming out as well now it can't um unfortunately there are certain things in this range right here for example i'm not doing any measurements of ozone and i'm not measuring specifically nitrogen dioxide versus sulfur dioxide versus carbon monoxide and those sorts of things all i'm getting is a single voc number coming out of the bme 680 sensor so there's going to be a bit of fudging in it this is certainly not something that's equivalent to the readings that you would get from you know a proper us epa or you know a department of meteorology measurement station where they've got the instruments to measure all of these things very accurately this is more like taking the readings that we can with the instruments that we've got available and then um coming up with an air quality index that tries to be representative but if you have a situation where your ozone level goes ridiculously high for example these sensors don't have the ability to detect that so oh well it's a limitation but it's the best we um we can do so um uh yeah peter kirk says i lived in beijing for two years i reckon most days were over five on all indexes yeah actually i've only been to beijing once and uh so the afternoon that i arrived it was like a typical hazy beijing afternoon and went to the hotel and we were up how high would it be i think it was only about five floors up so it was high enough that we could see out a little bit and it was basically you could see some buildings nearby and then it all just disappeared into the haze and the night that the so the first night that i was there it rained during the night and it cleared the air and got up the next day looked out the hotel window and all of a sudden i could see for miles and i could see there was a big sports field down there and all sorts of stuff but the difference between arriving on a hazy afternoon and the what it was like immediately after rain totally different thing uh oh mike made a good point samsung air purifiers are on sale today on ld special buys hmm that uh that could be worth checking out all right so uh guy said any idea when shipping may be resumed to the us yeah that is a difficult one um and it's totally beyond my control it comes down to well lots of things at the moment i can ship to the us this is the thing shipping is still happening but i can't use letter class or economy class packages which in the past have been the two options for for economical shipping i can only use international express or korea and courier is ridiculously expensive and even for a small box like say i wanted to take this and send it to the us so you know a small imagine it was a little cardboard box if i send that by standard international shipping i think the price is around 21 australian give or take and that is basically the cheapest that i can send anything to the us at the moment so those packages are going and they do get to their destination there's a little bit of unpredictability in terms of how long it takes to get there but those those higher price services are working it's just that i can't the real problem is things like the esp sorry the the sonoff programming adapters which is tiny it's a little thing it weighs like 15 grams in the past what i've been able to do is just put those into a padded envelope put a couple of dollars worth of stamps on it and post it and it would get there but unfortunately i can't send anything physical as a letter anymore so there's no international letter and international economy packages so the cheap options are gone which really sucks yeah um oh i don't normally say this but i'm going to call this out johnny bergdahl said don't forget the like button yes please go and click the like button and i know this is a silly sort of um egotistical thing but i've been watching the subscriber count over the last couple of months and thinking hmm i might actually make it to 100 000 subscribers by the end of the year now that's definitely not going to happen now but it's getting close i don't know where it's at at the moment but i think it's like 99 and a half thousand so yeah there's no way i'm gonna gain another 500 subscribers or whatever it is in the next 10 days but yeah please hit that like button um all right uh time for a oh yeah sorry seon just asked hey mike causey i'll cause there any link to the unit yeah so mike if that samsung filter on from is it from ld yeah ld special buys is available please drop the link in here if you can put in links ooh johnny said i passed 55 555 subscribers today woohoo yeah 100 000 is not a number that actually means nothing um yeah the big uh johnny the next big one coming up for you is going to be 65 536 or 35 depending on whether it's assigned or an unsigned end um so [Music] uh no that's not what it depends on depends on whether you it's before or after it rolls over to the next significant bit um uh yeah so going to 32 bits yes so um where am i at i don't know i feel like i need a drink i've been talking talking and talking um oh well thank you very much how does this work just unscrew it so this is a soda stream thing i've never actually used a soda stream andy turned up today with catering yes puppy dog so it's crazy he's got like he's broad thank you that's how we got you know he never eats it on raspberries [Music] he brought over raspberries and crackers and soda stream all sorts of stuff oh is this yes it will oh look it's fizzy is there any flavour to it or is it not just a soda soda water cool hypogen oxygen carbon that's it i think hydrogen oxygen and carbon everything we need for life almost so ceon said andy you're welcome to my workshop anytime all sorts of snacks there dodgy said it reminds me of wayne's world yeah we're not in a basement but maybe we should be also i'm going to turn on if that's okay with you it's um this room is quite well insulated and it warms up mostly because of these monitors if i just put my hand over the top of the monitor i can feel the heat coming off this it's like i'm sitting in front of radiators uh yeah i've actually recently been um wondering if i should do the calculation of what it costs in power to run these monitors and whether well i don't want to reduce the screen real estate too much but these are now quite old and i've been wondering where the the crossover point is in terms of buying newer more efficient monitors and the power saving that would have the point at which they pay for themselves i don't know um yes party on andy ah yes well uh right now we don't have the technology but in the past we would have had the technology to bounce the signal off the satellite down into the back of mr big's limo except we don't know mr biggs with a limo all right um what am i looking at i've still got the air quality sensor stuff up here uh get rid of all of that get rid of that all right uh it sounds like the naz discussion on discord uh yes so that for those of you who haven't been paying attention to discord and i only do sometimes unfortunately uh there has been a whole lot of discussion about migrating a bunch of disks in a computer to a nas and the question of going for something like unraid or freenas versus an appliance type device like a signology in fact this has come up a couple of times so since that last video came out where i showed all of the charting stuff let me see i'm not even sure if i'm going to show you this yet but i'm going to open it up on another screen uh maybe give you a little look at what i've got on my synology nas to show you how i've got this set up because i've been thinking about maybe uh let's see bring this around onto this desktop and switch to here so this is the user interface on my synology nas oh ram is getting a bit of a hammering there i wonder what's going on with that and i've got docker on it so in that particular video i showed installing mosquito and grafina and all of those sorts of things on uh on a raspberry pi just directly into raspberry pi os but the way i personally run it is i have it running in docker on my synology nas and you can see here these are the containers that i've got so you can see there's a node red container here and an influx db container i've got home assistant running on it i've got a unified controller running on it so that's how i manage my my ethernet switches and wi-fi access points and that sort of thing there's grafana and mosquito so each one of these is in a separate container oh i know why the ram is getting a hammering it's because i've also got a virtual machine running on it so i've got an ubuntu vm running on that nas at the moment which i was experimenting with so uh yeah i've got these um these containers that are doing different things and then i can update them by pulling down the newest image so what i've got is let's pick one so we can see one of the issues with setting things up in docker is making sure that your storage is persistent and that applies to things like configuration and also to data so as an example well influx db is kind of a complicated one so let's have a look at that if we come into here you can see that i've got actually no this isn't the most complicated one but it's a reasonable example you can see that i've got some volumes in here that have been mapped so what i've got is storage within the nas so it's on um it's on multi it's spread across multiple disks and it's all set up to be redundant so it's fairly resilient if one of the disks in the nas fails i can just pop it out put a new one in and then as keeps right on going and then i've got storage from my nas mapped into docker so for example i've got the influxdb.com file is stored persistently on my nas and the var lib influx db directory is also on the nas so what happens is that when the the container starts it reads from the nas to load those files which means that i can blow away the container install the new version like update it launch the new one and it will still read from the configuration file and everything that's stored externally so my data and my configuration are persistent even if the container is totally replaced so there are things like that that you need to be careful to do as part of the setup process yeah cool um oh yeah so uh ceon said which synology do i have i think this is an 1821 uh the ds1821 plus so yeah uh but i've still got the uh the original ram in it so it's only got four gig of ram and because i've pre-assigned a bunch of it to the of an ubuntu vm that's running at the moment that's why it looks like that so i'm just going to switch back to here and see if i can find my my vm might turn that off perhaps just logging into it anyway i shouldn't be fiddling around with this while i'm on a live stream it doesn't matter log off power out i'm going to see what effect this has on the ram on the signology so log out and i think the vm is shutting down now uh i just switched to a different desktop in order to um to do this and uh on the same desktop i've got some stuff in [Music] grafana but no i'm not gonna get into that right now all right sorry i was off chasing his grill and you couldn't even see the squirrel which means that it is excessively uninteresting so we'll need we'll leave that all right uh yeah so zeon said i'm running raid 10 and i got the 10 gig card for it for when i get my new imac so i have 10 gig ethernet between the two yeah i haven't put a 10 gig card in mine yet and my plan had been up until just recently my plan had been to put a 10 gig card in the nas and then get one of the um the new model imacs at some point when i can replace my existing one the i9 based imac and then of course apple released the m1 and any plans i had went totally out the window and now i'm in uh in limbo because they might be imminently replaced uh releasing an imac with an m1 or an m1x or m2 chip or whatever it isn't it or they might not i don't know but if i buy an imac right now what would probably happen is about a month later there would be a new imac with an m1x in it and i would have buyer's remorse but the interesting thing about the new m1s is that none of them have 10 gig ethernet including the mac mini so anyway this is a squirrel that's probably not something to talk about right now because it's not really related to the normal stuff i talk about on the the um the channel so [Music] uh well the ram is hasn't changed i wonder if that vm did actually shut down i don't know oh cool so mike has put in the url in fact i'm going to copy that url i want it for myself before it disappears out of the chat so if you're interested in the the air purifiers from ld there is a link in there three hundred dollars for an air purifier interesting uh em10 dutch control hmm four color cleanliness indicator all right so if you're looking to buy an air purifier that is probably something to check out because that's on special at the moment at least here in australia so uh all right so roger104 asked a very good question which is one of those um kicking the pants questions about why haven't i done something um so roger asked any movement on the light switches and the new controller board not in the last couple of weeks unfortunately i've had a um uh yeah my time has been rather jammed over the last few weeks because any discretionary time that i might have had around client projects has been taken up by the the conference batch for the swag page for lca 2021 and so time that i might otherwise have spent uh noodling around on on projects like the light switches or the air quality sensors or whatever i just haven't had available unfortunately but i'm hoping to do that soon so the two projects that i really want to get to the point where i can say this is released i mean they're never actually finished they're always improvements and bug fixes and things but the two projects that i want to have done to the extent that other people can make use of them are the air quality sensor and the new light switches well the light switches actually fall into it's really several sub projects there are the light switches like the smart switches with the rgb leds on them and the thing is that those should at this point just be some software that's it it's pretty much configuring test mode if i can make it do what i want it to do because i think the hardware for that is all working um the other is the light switch controller and i have it sitting just down under there it's about a meter and a half from me at the moment so it's always there reminding me that it needs to be done and uh yeah i've got to get back to it so that really ties in with the the rgb led light switches uh smart switches and um i think in terms of order what i should probably do is finish the smart switches first because the hardware for those is final this hardware is not final as you can see from the bodge wires but with the smart switches i've got the boards here i've already assembled prototypes i've done basic testing on them well it's gone through iterations it's more than just prototypes i've assembled the current version of the board which is what should be the final board so i've got it ready to go what i need to do is just spend some time playing around in the software and making it behave the way that um that we wanted to so oh michael thanks for coming along but then thanks for hanging around until 1 35 a.m um now go and get some sleep so what i need to do with that is just play around with the configuration and at this stage what i don't know is whether i'm going to be able to get it to run entirely on tasmota which i really want to do if i can make those light switches run test motor it has some really big advantages it means that i don't have to worry about about firmware development and updates and what i can do is make something like a a template for task motor so you do the basic has motor installation you load the template and then it'll be configured and work and it means that i can take advantage of things like the wi-fi setup process that is already in tasmota and you can use the tasmatizer to flash them it just makes it really easy so if i possibly can i really want to make them work with tess motor now the thing that's unknown about it and what i haven't actually solved yet is how to address the leds properly on the front of the light switch so there are four rgb leds or up to four they could be one two three or four and i need to be able to update them to change based on the state of the load of whatever you're switching and that could be changed somewhere else it doesn't necessarily it's not necessarily changed when you activate the light switch it could be changed through another light switch or from a phone or a schedule or a sensor or whatever the the cause of the change could come from anywhere so i need to have a way of updating the state of the load via mqtt and have that reflected in the rgb illumination on the light switch so that is it's not hard um like i can do that in tasmota easily if it is just a single led and you're just turning it on and off because what you can do is set up the mqtt topics and the configuration in tasmota to have that reflect the state of whatever it is that you're monitoring and the action of the button can be disconnected from that logically but doing it with a string of four uh ws2812 leds and being able to do things like change the color is not so easy it's messing around with with patterns in the driver anyway i won't get into it i've spent a fair bit of time messing around with it it looks like i can make it work i just need to get it properly working and make it neat and then those those light switches can be released which would be cool because then i can stop having that hanging over the ears yet another item on the to-do list there are enough of those already uh yeah and then it comes down to this thing which i have waved around on the live stream many times so i don't need to show you that in detail right now so yeah i'm breaking it all yeah the light switch controller with all of the inputs and the little screen and the display panel on there so the button panel uh yeah this is my attempt at bringing back the the old cobalt rack sort of style with the menu on the front and the buttons anyway that is further away from being done because there is some metal work to do and messing around with the hardware a little bit more so excuse me see you on okay thanks for coming along uh i'll talk to you soon uh okay so gary said can you show us the switch hardware yes i can let me see where it is but first i'm going to grab another strawberry thanks to andy all right switches just over here out of camera view it's just all in easy reach so this this is the previous version this is the current version and i will stick them over here so you can see what they look like let's get that camera out a bit move it there so this is the previous version of the light switch hardware so it's got in this case it's a four button panel but i've also got three button and two button panels and so it's got the rgb illuminated switches there the controller board on the back and then this is the current version this is what's probably going to be the final thing and this is this is the three version three button version i just don't have it connected onto the panel at the moment but i've had this connected to my computer and i've been playing around with tasmota on it so this one right now has taz motor installed on it there's the esp8266 all the parts down underneath the pcb so the difference with this one is that i took all of these parts that are on the top of the pcb and i put them on the bottom along with the esp8266 you can see the bottom of it sticking off there and here you can see it sticking off and the pcb has been pulled back from the antenna area so there is nothing affecting the antenna so hopefully we'll get good wi-fi performance on it and i've also moved things around up here so that we've got good clearance and you can plug the cable in there so anyway this one should be final this should actually be shippable ready hardware it's v 2.0 because i've had to go through a revision but um and it was a major revision so i bumped into the whole version i didn't just make it version 1.1 i thought it's enough of a change but it's going to be version 2 even though it's never been released so that in theory is ready to go i could be i could make those available today but the problem is there's not much point doing that when there's no no final software to run on it yes so where are we what am i up to um [Music] sorry i've kind of lost my mental train of thought here i don't know what's going on yeah somewhere monitoring the state okay so uh the so ross was asking about esp32 with ethernet and a few mcp i o expanders uh i assume that is talking about the controller about this in this particular case yes you can see the mcp 23017s all across there and that's how it's connecting to all of the i o that are in these sockets in this particular version this is the ethernet so on the front of the panel you'd have the connections to the light switches and this is the ethernet connection but this is just a pass through it doesn't actually do anything it's there purely for mechanical convenience so that this socket is exposed on the front of the rack mount case and it passes through to the back and then there is a little patch lead that goes to whatever device you have on the inside which could be a raspberry pi or an arduino or whatever you want to use basically and uh yeah so i've already done a partial layout of a version of this pcb that has an esp32 mounted on it in this area but i haven't actually finished the layout of that one and i'm not even sure if i'm going to because what it might make more sense is to make it a bit more modular you can see that there's a very long pcb here which has got all of the i o along this point and then this point here it might be better off to make that a separate pcb so that it's replaceable because everything apart from that like if we look from there across everything here can be the same it doesn't matter what micro controller you use so what i could do is put a header on here so the moment we've got this little header which is it passes through i squared c and power and reset and we could just put another one on this end and then this part could be on a separate board so what you could do is use a different board depending on how you want to configure it it could be a simple one like this which is just a pass through so it takes power in the front or in the back or you could do poe so that's a simple pass-through version it could be a version that has an esp-32 on it with poe and ethernet like this portion of it could be replaceable and make that bit modular uh yeah but i'm still kind of going over and over that in my head and trying to think about trying to think of the best solution to that how i want to do that so anyway that's the state of the hardware at the moment on this particular one so this prototype that i've been playing around with here is the case and you can see this one's got it's another one of those panels it's got the menu there and it's got the the lcd on there now this is the previous version of the control panel and it's got a six what is it a 128 by 32 oled so it's like a long and skinny oled this other one i need all my hands here for a moment so this is an updated version of the control panel and it's got a 128 by 64 oled so i went from you can see the two versions there there's a little one which is in this metal case and there is the larger one which has got the same menu buttons on it but it's got a much bigger display so it's twice as many pixels and it's physically wider as well so the um the pixels are physically bigger and the whole display is larger makes it a bit easier to read from a distance so that's the newer version of the hardware and here this was set up for a raspberry pi so you can see the mounting lugs here so these are uh river nuts yes river nuts so these are rivets with threads in the middle so that you can use you can screw straight into them with an m3 bolt and a raspberry pi mounts on those and then the front of the pipe was exposed here but in the final version the front of the pipe would not be exposed the pie would be sitting in the back somewhere probably in this region and just connected through to the ethernet passthrough and then that's the pi hat that sits on it and does power over ethernet and links through to the front of the panel anyway there are lots and lots of parts this particular project is is quite modular it's got it's not just one pcb there are one two three four yeah so there are at least four pcbs in this assembly and each one of them needs a little bit of work unfortunately so it's kind of functional like i've had this working running on the bench and communicating with all of these and being able to detect button events and things so it's functional as a proof of concept but it's not at the point where i could say here take this and use it yeah so mike suggested make those blocks of four ethernet ports a module so there are three identical daisy chain modules that is one option and um i yeah i thought about that and in fact i've i've even fabricated them let's see light switch uh i don't know if i'm gonna pull this out for now i don't think i will but i've made hang on let's let's go for some eagle just in the uh the dying minutes of this live stream i'm going to pull up eagle and show you what i've got so far because i have actually done versions of this that are just one uh thing like that and i've done one that is too so but i've only did i fabricate i can't even remember i think i might have had the other pcbs fabricated this project has been going on for so long uh now in fact so old that i think it might be in my old eagle directory so i've got to try to find it light switch light switch um no not there just finding this it's going to be a bit of a pain uh no i says no that's the light sweat shield no this is going to be riveting because it's going to be me oh here we go found part of it at least i squared cpanel well i'll open this up while i'm looking for other bits and switch back to desktop uh come on desktop okay so this is the um this is part of the schematic well that is the whole schematic for the little display board that goes in the front and oops and that is the design for that board that i was just showing you so this is the thing with the little panel that's the design for this which is the control panel part of it but what i'm looking for is come on i thought it was in i oh here it's right here okay so this is the version of it that had that is just eight where are we that's nest there uh yeah so as you can see it's got the um the shrouded header on each end as a pass through so what you could do is use three of these and daisy chain them to take the place of one of these or you could have two of them daisy chain them because you need to have a unique address on each of these mcp23017s there is a little solder jumper somewhere on the oh no it's not a solder jumper this part here so you can see here there are these pin headers and this is what you can use to set the unique addresses and i've also done a um done a version of this that you can see here which has got two of those big headers and then there's a version here which has got three of the big headers and that's the one that i've just been waving around in front of the camera so this one that you see on the screen right here is this thing but yeah we could also do it as that which is effectively that part so it's just these two or we could do it as uh this one which is effectively just one of these with a header on each end so that you can daisy chain them so yes it's flexible in that respect you could make a small version of the controller if you wanted to with just eight inputs or you can do it with 16 or with 24 right um gary hello to ireland thank you for joining us um you haven't missed much uh yeah and if you're joining now i'm going to be wrapping up in a few minutes anyway all right i've got to avail myself of andy's very generous sodastream provision i don't know why but i feel like i'm fading ah i'm gonna have some more raspberries is outside currently running around with my dog bonnie having a good time which is good get some exercise for both of them all right so where does this leave us with the light switch controller project um it's it's high on the priority list ooh thank you oh how good is this so more catering i've got crackers and dip tzatziki dip very nice so where it leaves me is it's it's something that i really want to get done but i need to get through a couple of other things before i can really return to playing around with this and give it the focus that it needs so this comes back to that question right at the end of the live stream last week which is uh what do i want to achieve or what are my goals for things i want to work on and what i really need to do is get through a couple of things so that they're finished and i can mark them off my to-do list people can start using them and then i can move on to the next thing i've got way too many projects that are in this state and this is hardware that is basically done there the other parts of the system need some slight revisions there needs to be some code for it i need to write documentation for it and then people can start using this like this could be released but it just never gets you know that that final little bit where it gets out there it doesn't get there because it sits in a box on a shelf somewhere and there are always other projects that are ahead of it in the queue which i personally find frustrating and a little bit sad it gets me down sometimes because i sit there and think about all of these projects that i really want to uh and the thing is it feels so close right i can plug this in now and it works but um with him harder the beatings will continue until morale improves um so yeah it just frustrates me i need i don't know it's something about the way i work is that i don't remain i don't maintain focus on something like this through to the point where it is done before i move on to something else and i end up interleaving a whole lot of projects i'll send boards off for production and then while i'm waiting for the board the pcbs to come back i'll work on something else and then when they come back i'll assemble it and then i'll go off and work on something else and i'll come back and work on software and these things just drag on and on and on so ah i'm really sorry about that um oh john spencer said let me know when you replace your screens so john i think currently has at least three of my uh of my screens at his place i think it's three maybe more by now uh yeah so uh utf uh sorry utb fcc asked did i install ethernet cables in my house walls at a time when it was built or after the house was built the answer is both because a couple of years ago well a couple of years ago quite a few years ago we did a really big extension and renovation and this so where i am now in this lab area and the garage and some other parts of the house were all built new uh a few years ago and as part of that it was all pre-cabled so all of the new part of the house was cabled when it was at the framing stage and at the same time that was done well actually before that was done i had retrofitted ethernet into the old part of the house but then as we were doing the renovations one of the things we did was the old part of the house was almost entirely gutted we moved a few walls around combined some rooms and changed a few things thanks tim uh and uh so for quite a while our house internally like from the outside it looked okay all the weatherboards were on etc but from the inside it was bare frame because all of the plaster had been stripped off the walls had been stripped off the ceiling so the inside of the ceiling space was all exposed and while it was at that internal frame stage the electrician did some re-cabling so in terms of mains cabling there was a whole lot of new stuff put in new power circuits were run and at the same time there was ethernet cable through so it's some of it has been done by fishing through walls but i was in the very lucky situation where i could do a whole lot of re-cabling while the framing was exposed which is by far the easiest way to do it um hey tim thanks for that oh yeah i really appreciate it and i try to make the videos easy to follow um yeah uh oh so dodgy said i call it the procrastinator mentality we'll sometimes do anything to avoid finishing something that blocks us um i think i do that sometimes like if there is something that feels like a roadblock then i'll avoid working on it but i think with me it is more of the squirrel problem it's more of the distraction that i have so many things that i want to do and i have ideas that buzz through my head that i think oh this sounds really cool i want to go off and do that so i will very quickly like i will jump to opening eagle on a new project and start laying out a whole new board on something when i've got 20 other projects that are in this stage sitting in a box and it's not finished but it could be so i think the big discipline for me is not starting new things that's what i really gotta try to do and uh yeah and really focus on going back to these projects that are at that 95 point and finish them one of the things that i actually find is a barrier for me is the idea of trying to make videos about this as well because part of the problem is that i don't want to just work on a project like this and then when it's finished make a video what i really want to do is show you the process and a lot of the time i fail on that because recording the process takes a lot of time it's very easy to grab a board like this pull it out plug in my laptop start messing with firmware and and just do that in short bursts but if i've got a record while i'm doing that it just takes so much setting up cameras setting up the microphone so i can record while i'm doing it and talking about it doing screen captures etc while i'm working on it the overhead of documenting the process compared to just doing the process is really high yes um oh oscar said uh hey john been a while since i tuned in how are the health issues hope you're doing better thanks for asking oscar um yeah i'm doing much better so it's really only in the last one to two weeks that i have been back to what i would call pretty much normal so like breathing is normal sleeping is normal and so it took a a really long time to get to get back to some sort of degree of normality uh yeah so uh tim and frank they said i needed an assistant or someone to help get that last five percent done the uh the problem is that these are not commercially viable projects this is all the stuff that i'm doing in my spare time and mostly for the fun of it and uh in the hope of making videos about it but i don't really make money on it if you look at the hours that are involved in doing something like this it's really not economically viable it doesn't make any sense to do it and it certainly doesn't make well it doesn't make me money let alone [Music] enough money to pay someone else to help with it as well um uh yeah so andy wave to dodgy um yes so utbe fcc asked are you planning to add an air purifier into home automation so that it can be controlled from node red window sensor readings go high uh i don't know i've been thinking about that so the first step was just quantifying and reading all of these things so that i can discover when there are problems i have been thinking more recently very seriously about getting an air purifier probably just for this lab area not necessarily for them like trying to do it for the whole house but this is a it's a fairly well enclosed area and it's small enough that an air purifier could probably have a good effect in this little volume it's not like i'm trying to clean the air in an entire house so uh yeah i have been thinking about it but i'm not sure if i'm gonna do it it's an extra expense something else i've gotta buy um but then if if it makes a difference in terms of me not getting sick then it's worth it yeah it's one of those things where all right an air purifier is 300 and i would think um 300 that's a fair bit of money that i wouldn't just go out and spend without thinking long and hard about it but 300 if that saves me you know potentially days and days of being unable to be productive then it's easily worth the money so yeah anyway um i've really only just recently got to the point where i am quantifying the problem enough to be able to start thinking about the decision of whether i want to um to buy one ah yeah that is a really good point dodgy so dodgy said i could always just hook it up to the extraction system yes uh that i really should do that because that is the thing is that the um the data is already coming in from the air quality sensor my extraction system is already controlled by the home automation system via mqct that would really be one no two two extra nodes in node red oh tim thank you very much that is very generous so now i've got an air purifier fund um so in node-red basically i would just have to take it out of the values coming from the air quality sensor and have a function node that looks for a threshold and if it exceeds a threshold it sends a command to the extraction system and the other thing i've thought about doing is setting it up so that when i turn my soldering iron on it also turns on the extraction system but i like the idea of doing it off the data coming from the air quality sensor that is a neat idea one of the problems i've got right now is that my extraction system is quite noisy yeah i'm going to turn it on so if you have a device which is she who shall not be named um do it now so ah the celtic beast said do it now and then the message was retracted i am kind of tempted to open node red night right now and start messing around in it but uh i'm already well past my two hours so i um i won't do it right now uh let's see so let's just see if you can hear this alexa please turn on the exhaust fan okay you can see that astra is paying attention she's looking over there wondering what's making all that noise i don't know if you can hear it through the microphone so microphone is up here near the computer where astra is down there hello there is an extraction fan which is hanging down underneath the bench and that is sucking air from the ben the soldering area and from over near the laser cutter goes around and it vents it outside but it makes this noise so right here i have a set of bluetooth headphones with noise cancelling built in so often when i'm sitting here soldering i will run the exhaust fan and i'll have the noise cancelling headphones on but i really just need to have a quieter exhaust system alexa please turn off the exhaust fan didn't hear me alexa turn off the exhaust fan okay that's better island always goes away oh and johnny thank you for your contribution to the air purifier fund um yeah so dodgy said not very loud but that's probably just because of the pickup on the microphone here being over near the computer and the thing is over there under the bench so if i'm sitting here at the soldering area that noise going like if that's going for hours and hours in the background it's one it's sort of thing that if it's running for a couple of minutes you can kind of ignore it but if it's going for hours it's really annoying so um i need to have a already a third there yeah um so what i need to do is get one of those aldi air purifiers and see if i can hack it to link it into mqtt and yeah maybe do a video about that that would be cool so hang on let's see i had it open i'm just gonna switch no somewhere i had a window open with that ld special deal on it where did it go i don't know yes i've still got it here so this is the link that was put in the chat earlier so this is the samsung air purifier which is currently on special at ld for 299 dollars i definitely need to check this out it would be it'll be cool to be able to hook this into the automation system alrighty well uh i'll look for look for a couple of quick comments and then i'm going to wrap it up for the day yeah so um i said how's the lawn mower well the lawn mower is still mowing the lawn it is working just fine looks great out there yeah the um the nice thing is that i haven't mowed the main area of the lawn personally for a few years now uh it just it's just always nice and flat i still do have to use the manual mower for the edges like some of the edge areas that the auto mower doesn't get to and i also use it in the front yard and on the nature strip so what i need to be able to do is get back to this very old project this is a project from years and years ago which was the idea of making a thing under the house so that the auto mower can pass underneath my house and get into the front yard and then mow that as well uh yep um oh mike cause i said it was last week's special best uh special buy but there were still six of them my local elder this morning yeah that is really interesting uh so i might go and check my aldi and see if i have any of those those air purifiers so um did you oh no okay so this is a very good question peter lawler said did i reverse engineer the controller software this is in relation to the auto mower no i haven't and i need to start doing some fun hacks on it i've got lots of ideas for things i could do with auto mower and initially i didn't want to touch it because it was supplied by husqvarna and technically they still owned it and so i didn't want to start hacking around on it and then have them turn up and say we want our mower back now but it's been years and i haven't heard from them so i suppose i own it now it's old enough that they they wouldn't want it back so um yeah it would now be reasonable for me to start messing around with it uh yeah so gary pointed out this is in relation to the air purifier and has modus on off inside would be a simple hack yeah i'm going to get one i think i'm convinced enough that now that i've seen the effect that the soldering iron has on the stuff that's floating around in the air i really do think it's worth getting an air purifier and quantify the effect that it has so utb fcc said uh it's very easy to hack the allen t500 hepa air purifier just adding mosfets into three lines plus an esp32 and you get a hepa air purifier with six modes controllable from node-red nice um talking about mosfets all right one last thing before i sign off let me find a project that i think i would use for this so i've got to think about what did i even call it i've got sorry my um my eagle directory is many hundreds of projects long so just finding something is a bit of a problem it was esp that's right i think it was called esp remote uh scrolling scrolling scrolling esp uh yes here we go esp remote this project and i'll throw back to desktop come on back to desktop so this is a project i did a few years ago and once again this falls into the it's been released no no it hasn't been released but i could um desktop there this okay so this is a pcb with uh an esp8266 on it this runs taz motor and it's got four mosfets on it and they're set up as low side switches so the idea is that what you could do is use this to hack something like a garage door remote control or any of those uh devices that you like just a 433 megahertz remote control you attach the remote control into that area on the pcb let's see if this makes it any easier to see uh no not really and then this runs tasmota and it's got these four switched outputs which means that you can patch these into the buttons on the remote control and then use tasmota to control the remote control which then controls whatever it is that you're wanting to control and the whole thing is fairly small as you can see from the version number here this is version 3.1 this has been through quite a few iterations i've been using these myself for years they're very cool little boards and i've never made them available i really should so many projects that are in this state so this is a board that is specifically designed for hacking into things so that you can use mosfets to switch the uh you know the manual buttons on whatever the devices that you're hacking and it's got a little switch mode regulator on here so that it can take a wide input voltage range and i've got another version of it which is this one which uses read relays so that it's got complete electrical isolation from the target device so you can use these six outputs this version has six instead of four so these switch six switched outputs can be wired across the buttons on a target device and then you run tasmota on the esp8266 and you can control whatever your device is alrighty um yeah and once again i've got a bunch of these where is it boxes just down is around here somewhere esp remote usb remote uh i need to update my indexing system so the thing where i tell different boxes to turn on does not yet know about all the boxes it only knows about some of them so well there's one okay so that is ripped out of focus so this is my little device for hacking remote con for hacking devices to add control of buttons that one and this one uh yeah i've got a bunch of them in here switch to the overhead camera hopefully i'm not showing anything on there that i shouldn't i don't think so so this one on the left is the one with reed relays so there's an esp8266 with tes motor on it and then the six switched outputs and this one which is in the box the reason that this is such a strange shape like this is that it is designed to fit inside one of these plastic enclosures so what i can do is just squeeze this i need a screwdriver there and it's got this shape in the top so you can get a screwdriver in so what you can do is just squeeze this apart pop that up and the board comes out and it fits onto those little retaining lugs in there so this is the version of it which has the mosfets so one on the left is read relays for the switched outputs the one on the right has the mosfets here and then these are the four uh mosfet outputs well inputs it's for um low side switching so you take the pcb for your remote control and cable tie it onto that area and then you patch across from those connections to it and then apply power and then you can control your device anyway if i'm going to hack something like an air purifier that's got buttons that need to be pushed in order to control it i'd use one of these two boards one or the other i don't know uh yeah so um hmm i think i'm gonna wrap it up here i am mentally fading but come on switch i can't get this thing to switch obs is not responding there we go i need a better way of switching cameras yes free deck i need to build a free deck in fact i have built a free deck i need to set it up i don't know i'm just saying random things now that's a sign that i need to wrap this up all right uh where can i put this now just here when it gets to the point where i'm just rambling and i don't even know what i'm talking about it is time to say goodbye um wait peter said wait more puppy aha yes great idea hey astra say hello okay a little bit hang on let's see it's sitting just on top of a monitor which means that it's um i can't really bring it down lower that's better all right okay puppy we didn't you see playing the stage management here okay peak high five high five go over over pull over over over here we go yes yeah and she's going to squirrel screw up screw the screw squirrel that's into that squirrel there we go all right so where are we okay anyway i'm gonna go um thank you for coming along and thank you andy for being catering officer and uh sitting there for the last couple of hours flashing boards this is um it's been a really big help saving me from having to do all of that flashing so uh yes i will see you next week probably i've got to figure out where the next sunday falls in relation to holidays and all of that sort of thing but i really appreciate you coming along and also thank you very much for the the donations towards the air purifier fund those donations i think have tipped me over the edge and i've i've got to the point where kind of the decision is made i'm going to get an air purifier and see what i can do with linking it to the automation system that is really that yeah i think that will be interesting and a good practical use for the data coming from the air quality sensor so thank you very much have a fantastic weekend whatever is left of it for you and a great week this week i will see you soon see you i started saying bye and then change it to see you so see ya you

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 8,033

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Id: DvKNtPrp3P4

Length: 144min 50sec (8690 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020