Why do we need a smart home?

This is why a smart home is needed: to understand your home better and communicate with pros on their own language — My dialog with the dishwasher’s company (DC): Me: Hi, I’d like to inform you about my dishwasher’s problem. DC: Sure, please give me your address (by address, they know what type of the … Read moreWhy do we need a smart home?

Low-powered living body detection

A friend asked me to design a low-powered living body detection system for a rural farm in Indonesia. The constraints are no electricity and limited Internet connectivity. The system is designed in microservices atop Raspbian to ease massive rollout.

Mailbox checker

As an online shopper, I need to regularly check my mailbox, 5 floors separated from home. It is really annoying to check whether a new delivery arrives. I came out with this mailbox checker solution that should draw low power (less frequent battery replacement, >6 months) and small (portable). To detect mailbox door activity, I … Read moreMailbox checker

My first experiment with Zigbee

Instead of buying an expensive and proprietary Zigbee gateway, I bought a Zigbee sniffer that could be “changed” to be a universal gateway (https://lnkd.in/dj9HwBF). The cheapest Zigbee device I could play with is the Ikea Tradfri lamp (~7 euro). But it’s more worth than buying a full set of Ikea smart lighting (cost > 25 … Read moreMy first experiment with Zigbee

Zwave+ vs. WiFi-based IoT devices

There are at least 4 competing IoT connectivity technologies that have already numerous rolled-out products in the market, i.e., RF-433 MHz, WiFi (ESP8266-based devices), Zigbee, and Zwave+. The first two have abundant cheap products, the other two have limited vendor-independent commercial products. I saw a lot of Zigbee & Zwave vendor-locked devices at IoT Expo … Read moreZwave+ vs. WiFi-based IoT devices

Precision agriculture for a rural area with limited connectivity

Among many hyped agriculture technologies under industry 4.0 umbrella I’ve ever seen, this Microsoft solution, namely FarmBeats, appropriately addresses Indonesia’s geographical challenges. As a solution architect, what I like the most from the presentation is that how they synthesized the problem and designed a solution for it.Here are the summaries of the challenges:1) limited connectivity … Read morePrecision agriculture for a rural area with limited connectivity