Thermo-hygro-light’o-thingie
In the series of don’t-we-already-have-more-than-enough-of-these-gizmos: Today I made a simple power conscious cloud-connected weather sensor. While the design itself is trivial, it seems that ready-made devices available seriously lack in connection options and customisability – while doing something like this is a simple matter of programming™.
Clocks and timers are boring you say? Yes they are, and there are plenty of existing implementations. So, against intuition: let’s reinvent yet another egg timer to see how the idea twists with semi-analog circular LED-display-gauge-thingie.
Rock on – what could possibly go wrong with cheapest-possible piece of equipment that is designed to capture both sound and video, is made in China and costs about 25 USD, and comes with real internet connectivity – you know: cloud backends and all.
So, I went off to dig some more blood from my nose. I bought one – no, I bought three Xiaomi Xiaoyi Ants web cameras, and went to see what’s inside and how (in)secure they are. Continue reading
Typical IoT system level components
It is 2016 and everything is connected to internet in a way or another, what’s the big fuzz about privacy and security of these little devices? After all we have made consumer gadgets since ages, and one in a while malfunction or vulnerability gets discovered and shotly it gets fixed, right?
By looking closely at some of my connected devices, I found interesting stuff that has gone largely unnoticed. And more interesting is to come, for reasons I am about to explain.
Panic? Get up? Or stay in bed and continue sleep?
Ok, so sandwiching a clock on clock wasn’t the greatest idea there – what would be the next marginally smarter idea? Adding wake up alarm! In the vast sea of alarm implementations there isn’t much to be celebrated in terms of unique and clever design. So going for the context around it: How about hose dark moments in the middle of night when one suddenly wakes up wondering if the alarm goes off at the next moment.
Ikea wall clock with electronics installed to backside. Below motion sensor without casing.
It is 2016 and we are about to have flying cars soon, it would about the time to start turning old non-smart objects to smart ones. How would one make a wall clock smarter, say by an epsilon?
For long I have played with the idea on turning the most mundane objects into something completely different – so when I saw ¢ 50 Ikea RUSCH wall clock, made from semi-transparent plastic I knew it would be an opportunity to add some oddball functionality there. Ikea tuning it is, lets start putting the steroids in.
It is holiday season, and I see a pattern with several of my friends. They have started tuning their xmas tree lights. Thus, challenge accepted. Now, I am not going for excessive amount of lights; 240 RGB-pixels are plenty for me,instead I’ll go for the tech in it.