Month: January 2015

  • Pimped-Out DIY Alarm Bell Box

    For reasons of general sensibleness and security I won’t go into much detail about exactly how my DIY Alarm Bell Box is configured to work in relation to actually keeping thieves away. Just a reminder that it’s always best to get help from Electronic Manufacturing Services for projects like this. Suffice to say: network of […]

  • How Kerning Could Save Your Life

    As someone who buys electronic goods from China on a regular basis, I am used to looking closely at the CE logo to check how close together the letters are. For my buying habits it doesn’t matter. I’m dealing with low-voltage stuff. The worst that could happen is a component might overheat and cause a […]

  • Home Automation PoE with Arduino – in praise of DIY PoE!

    Disclaimer First up I’d say in any professional environment there’s no way I’d recommend anything but “proper” PoE, that is to say 802.3af or PoE plus. For DIY home installations, however, we can do things differently. And I don’t mean “substandard” by any means. Rather we can do them in a more tightly-spec’d way, we can […]

  • The spec for the ultimate home control panel

    A number of months ago I became obsessed with the idea of controlling my room lighting using knobs in the wall. Crazy, I know 😉 Seriously though, most lighting automation systems do not use rotary controllers (i.e. knobs), but rather you have to keep your finger on a button until the desired light level is […]