Electronics
nfcAudio is an MP3 player, with audio files selected thanks to an NFC tag placed
on top of it. I build this two years ago for my kid so he can play by himself
his preferred nursery rhymes and songs, it is still used at least once a week
:-)
It is powered by an ESP8266 to play audio from a remote server, an I2S DAC
driving the speaker and an NFC reader. Thanks to WiFi we can use it to play
local files or any webradio stream from the Internet.
I recently did a proof of concept on shutters automation by hacking the remote
control: the idea is to wire the ESP in parallel with the remote control
buttons.
My remotes are Bubendorff 41677 but it should work with a lot of other remote
controls.
I have a great Rika pellet stove, but despite all the
embedded electronics, it is unable to warn me just before the pellets tank is
empty. As I already have my own low-power wireless devices and home automation
tools, I just added a distance sensor and designed some enclosures.
I was looking to use InteractiveHtmlBom plugin for KiCad but unfortunately, Debian maintainers did not set KICAD_SCRIPTING
option in the official package. After a few failing attempts I even tested the official flatpak package but it is an old version (currently 4.x) and scripting is not enabled too.
So I dug further until it actually succeeds to compile :-)
I am currently working with BLE beacons -only iBeacons for now- with Espressif’s
esp-idf
libraries. The aim is to use the ESP32 as a gateway to published
detected beacons to an MQTT broker. It was surprisingly easy and I will write
something about that when the
code will be more polished.
Anyway, by curiosity and to speed up development, I wanted to try
microPython port to ESP32, and I did. Unfortunately, BLE support is not yet
reliable enough and a lot of advertisements were lost with 4 to 6 beacons. This
post is to keep track of my work and, hopefully, use in the future when
microPython port will be more reliable :-)