Oh mean… what did I do!? It’s been a year since my last post and too much has happened in that time, sorry for that! But let’s do a quick recap of the highlights.
Workplace upgrade
Exactly one year ago we were in a time when “education from distance” was the norm and I also started an internship what happened from home, so I decided to invest in my workplace at home.
My workplace consisted of a small desk with a shelving unit on both sides and I thought that could be better. It seemed very cool to me, but also much better to get a desk that you can move up and down, so that you can work sitting or standing. In the end I found one at worktrainer, which offers several products to be active in your workplace and I also notice that my productivity has improved. BTW that 3D printer has already been replaced for an Ender 3-V2 model 😀
Intern at Nabu Casa
In February 2021 I started an internship at Nabu Casa to work on Home Assistant and plunged into the world of energy management. What are nice ways to measure your energy data at home and organize this data in a special dashboard. I really had a great time there (thnx Paulus and the rest of the team!) and I’m still talking about it with other students.
Home Assistant Glow
One of the things that emerged from this project is the Home Assistant Glow, a device that you can use to read the pulse LED of an energy meter. Handy for, for example, if the P1 port on your meter is missing and that was also the case in my own studio, so we had a perfect test case.
Energy Dashboard
The place where everything comes together, the energy dashboard. Created on the basis of paper prototyping on my refrigerator and eventually developed into the dashboard that you now see/know in Home Assistant.
You gain insight into how much energy you use, but also how much you use through your solar panels or how much you give back to the grid. It can make a simple cost calculation picture for you and at the bottom you will find the consumption of individual appliances in your home.
Forecast Solar
At the last minute, a Forecast.Solar integration was born. Which, based on data from your solar panel installation, can predict what the production will be for tomorrow and possibly even further in the future. It had some snags in the beginning, because not all continents were fully supported (nowadays they are) and it remains a prediction so it sometimes deviates.
But the idea behind it was that you at least have more insight into future production and that you may also be able to estimate better when the energy production peak is for you and therefore the washing machine has to be switched on.
Minor Robotics
After the summer holidays (in 2021) I started with a minor in “Robotics, Domotics and industrial automation”. Which theoretically goes very much into electronics, components and communication protocols. But also a piece of machine learning and finally a 10-week project in a group, in which you can decide for yourself what you want to build.
Together with a fellow student at the minor, we eventually built a walking robot, how cool is that!
So that’s it for now. In the meantime, I’m working on nice other projects at the moment (study related) and at Dutch Drone Squad we have finally been able to run a nice drone indoor training season 21/22 after covid-19. So yes it’s going well and hopefully I won’t keep you waiting so long for a new blog.
