Hi folks,

after having some tough time with finishing my PhD and digging into my new job as power electronics scientist at Silicon Austria Labs I had some time to prepare a few new things.

Finally the idea of microcontrollers, connected with webservers and capturing, storing and presenting data got a lot easier last years. So I kept up by working on ideas for IoT projects as my flat and garden definitely needed improvements towards automation and optimization (well that’s the computer engineers point of view).

Despite the fact that I decided to use well established standard WiFi technology with off-the-shelf IoT devices and collecting data on a web server to keep system design complexity minimal.

The initial idea behind my proposed distributed microcontroller systems project was the same – but at some point I realized, it’s damn easy with WiFi MCUs nowadays!

Especially with new technologies and Microcontrollers (as e.g. the ESP8266 and ESP32) with WiFi onboard a whole new era for easy integration with web 2.0 services had begun. And with that in mind I started several projects in parallel to make our home a bit more intelligent.

As teaser a short preview of what is upcoming in the next posts:

• First steps with running Linux VMs & docker containers,
• Setup of a reverse-proxy for proxied services (nextcloud & IoT devices),
• Home and Garden automation using a selfmade API on an ESP8266, a python scripts in the Backend and a awesome Husqvarna Automower API,
• and an autonomous Nestbox for small birds with ESP32 connected to a Node-Red Backend (see photo below).