home automation

As you know, IFTTT recently announced their “Pro” subscription and restrictions on free accounts. Under IFTTT’s new subscription policy, you can only have 3 “custom” applets created/enabled at any time – which is quite a downgrade from their unlimited free plan.

Ever wondered if there was a way to make Google Assistant-controlled projects…

WhatsApp is one of the most popular cross-platform messaging tools that is used by a vast majority of people. Even though its recent privacy policy update came as an unpleasant surprise for many people, the user base WhatsApp still holds good and nearly 2 billion people use WhatsApp today. This huge user base has attracted many medium and large-scale businesses to use…

Relays are common in many switching circuits where controlling (turning ON or OFF) an AC load is required. But due to the electromechanical characteristic, a mechanical relay has a self-life, and also it can only toggle the status of the load and cannot perform other switching operations like dimming or speed control. Apart from this, an electromechanical…

In many cases,  ESP32 capacitive touch sensors are used instead of push buttons. The advantage is that we don't have to provide force to press a button, and we can activate a key without touching it using touch sensors. Touch-sensing technology is becoming popular day by day. And within the last decade or so, it has become difficult to imagine the world without touch-…

With the advancement in virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa, Home automation and Voice controlled applications are becoming normal. Now, we ourselves have built many home automation projects, from simple Automatic Staircase Lights to IoT based web controlled Home Automation using Raspberry Pi. But this project here is different, the idea here is to create a…

As applications based around Wireless Sensor Networks, Home Automation, and IoT increased, the need for alternative communication protocol asides the regular Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GSM protocols was becoming obvious. Several technologies like Zigbee and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) were developed as alternatives but one standout technology, developed to specifically serve home…

GetWired is a new wired home automation system announced by Dmoatic – a DIY Home Automation Enthusiast group from Poland. Although it is the age of wireless automation, the wired automation modules have the advantages of their own like communication stability, higher throughput, lower latency, Immune interfaces, etc. On top of all, it needs no batteries and no internet…

Recently I got intrigued with all the new Home Automation products in the market and hence I purchased a Google Home Mini and few other smart devices to control lights, fans, AC and what not. While it did work and everything was fun to use, I got a bit troubled with having all these wireless connectivities happening around me. My bedroom alone had 5 smart devices, and…

Smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google home are getting popular now days and both have capability to integrate custom skill or action to control any appliance using those Smart speaker. We previously built our own Smart speaker using Raspberry Pi and Alexa, and also controlled home appliances using this Raspberry Pi smart speaker.

As a kid I was fascinated by a toy music car which gets triggered when you clap your hands, and then as I grew up I wondered if we can use the same to toggle lights and fans in our home. It would be cool to just turn on my Fans and lights by just clapping hands instead of walking my lazy self to the switch board. But often times it would malfunction as this circuit will…

In previous tutorial we have discussed about MQTT Protocol and installed local MQTT server on our Raspberry Pi for controlling the GPIO locally. But the drawback of local MQTT server is that we cannot control the GPIOs from anywhere in the world, it only provides services locally. But if this MQTT server is hosted on some cloud then any appliances connected to Raspberry Pi…

Raspberry Pi is one of the most famous low cost computer and powerful tool for prototyping different types of IoT and embedded projects. With the popularity of Raspberry pi in the IoT domain, Particle cloud started support for this board on its platform.

Particle Cloud is a very popular IoT platform which can help you to start with everything that…