Copeland Royall

In my previous post, I covered how I set up rudimentary home automation with Tasker and a Xiaomi Yeelight bulb. In this post, I’ll be sharing how I upgraded to a dedicated headless home automation server. The first goal of mine to achieve with a new setup was to self-host: only use cloud-based services if absolutely necessary in order to prevent downtime in the case of an internet outage. As I covered in the previous article, the Yeelight supports LAN control, allowing a box on the local network to change the state of the bulb without going through a server in China. This could be achieved through my main PC, but since it would need to be always running in order for my lights to work, I decided instead that a low-power server would be much more suitable for my needs. I went into researching the server with a few requirements: passive cooling, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet and a price less than £80. I decided passive cooling would be necessary, as having a fan running 24/7 in my ro...

In this post I’m going to be taking a look at the Xiaomi Yeelight Colour I ordered from AliExpress, and how I started experimenting with basic home automation for my room through Tasker. The model of Yeelight I bought supports 24 bit colour reproduction (your standard [255, 255, 255] RGB values), controllable from the Yeelight app. The app represents one of my biggest issues with the Yeelight, and all IoT devices like it, which is their security risk. When you tell the Yeelight to turn on using the app, the command is sent to the light via one of three user-selectable servers: mainland China, Singapore and the US. This introduces some considerable latency when waking the light from its ‘OFF’ mode, as the request must go from my home network in London, around to the other side of the world to be processed in a server, and then sent back to my light once more. The Yeelight Now, why is this inherently insecure? Well, aside from the possibility that someone could gain access to Ye...

This is part 2 of the ‘How to quadcopter’ series. You can find part 1 here . In part 1, I covered how 2.4GHz radio systems are used to control drones. In this post, I’ll be looking at how pilots can control their multirotor beyond visual LOS (Line-of-Sight) through FPV (First Person View). Creating an image Let’s start with the camera. FPV cameras are designed to be small and lightweight so they can be easily mounted on drones or other vehicles. All contemporary racing drone frames have hardware designed to securely mount FPV cameras. These hold the camera securely inside of the drone’s frame to protect the lens in case of a crash. These camera mounts allow the pilot to position the camera at specific angles so that when the multirotor is flying at high speed with the frame tilted forward, the camera remains level in relation to the ground. Foxeer Arrow V3 There are a few different specifications of FPV cameras that are very important to drone pilots: the sensor, size, ...