About a year ago, I bought a smart home water monitor in order to keep an eye my water use at home. The city where I live provides a big rebate on one particular device from San Luis Obispo company Flume. I was immediately curious about how this device could work and was excited to open the box when it arrived and inspect the contents.

There are two hardware components in this system. One component, the sensor, is designed to be physically strapped to your water meter. The other component, the bridge, receives information from the sensor and connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi to deliver all this data to Flume. Flume provides an API for customers to access their own data and there’s even a Home Assistant plugin which should help bring all this information to the platform I run at home.

But I wanted to learn more about how this all works and was curious if there could be a way to access this data more directly. As friendly as Flume seems to be, I do feel that if I buy a device to track my own data, that data should belong to me. But also, it would be nice to know that if Flume ever closes up shop or shuts down its web service, that these devices could all still be useful. So let’s take a closer look at the hardware to see what’s really happening.

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In 2023, I managed to integrate my garage doors with HomeAssistant using a Shelly Uni device. Controlled remote operation is pretty great, but I wanted to document this project because this solution covers remote door control, door state and even door light control is possible, using a single $12 device with no batteries required. The setup is easy to achieve, and leaves all the garage door opener functionality in tact.

Overview

• Shelly Uni device is powered from a 12v DC power source leeched from the low-voltage side of the garage door control circuit board
• Garage door switch is operated using one of the two potential free outputs on the Shelly Uni
• Garage door state is monitored using both Shelly Uni inputs, detecting open/closed circuits on the garage door opener’s own state sensors
• Light control is not implemented, but could be added to the extra Shelly Uni output in an extremely simple circuit

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A binary clock is hardly a new idea, but this particular concept is something I haven’t seen anywhere else. And it was idling in the back of my mind for over a decade before finally seeing a working prototype.

Concept

The passage of time can be measured in any number of ways, but when a clock is designed for humans, I think it should be based on a natural concept. Since I live on Earth, I designed a clock, as many others have, based on the smallest natural temporal concept I can readily observe: the day.

The day is plenty useful for medium-term planning, but it lacks the precision needed for many purposes, and so it must be divided in order to build a useful clock. This is where clock design becomes much more arbitrary. Dividing the day into 24 was supposedly based on astronomical observations of various stars passing in the night, but beyond that, there’s no natural reason there should be 60 minutes in an hour and so on.

My thought, is that the simplest and most natural way to divide a day would be in half. This is essentially the AM/PM indicator which is a concept so natural and necessary, that even many of our 12 hour clocks use it to avoid the otherwise ambiguous information displayed. But if the most natural way to divide a day is in two, then maybe the next most natural division is in two again. Dividing a day repeatedly in two results in a kind of binary clock. And this is exactly the concept.

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Having been thoroughly satisfied with prior HP printer experiences, I made the mistake of purchasing a brand new HP Photosmart c7280. I’m a big fan of these all-in-one devices. I especially like having a WiFi interface, and scanning to a USB disk as opposed to some ridiculous TWAIN protocol is such a great idea it’s hard to imagine why some devices still don’t support it. But all the things I love about this printer are outweighed by the horrible ink system.

Lets start with the most obvious problem with these ink cartridges. They’re way too small, the color cartridges are only 11 mL. I’ve seen claims that they can yield up to 500 pages. I have no data to argue with that figure, but I can tell you it seems very high compared to what I’ve seen.

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In part 1 of this series, I took an Asus router and loaded openwrt onto it. I added an LCD display and connected it to the serial port on the router board. At this point, I have a low-power, small form factor computer that I can customize to my heart’s content. As far as I/O, the computer still has its original wifi antenna, 5 wired LAN interfaces, a serial port and a USB port. My USB sound adapter still hasn’t arrived from Hong Kong, so I’m going to work on another piece of the puzzle.

The first thing I did after joining this device to my wifi network was telnet in and change my password. Now the project that I’ve been following up to this point is mainly to be used for playing internet radio stations as I understand it. My wifi radio is going to be used for that too, but also for playing selections from my own music library. I plan to get one of these Buffalo 1TB Linkstation NAS devices and put all my media on it and leave it down in the basement. I’ve read that you can really customize these devices, but all I need to do is add an ssh server to it. Then I can mount the whole filesystem to a folder on my wifi radio and have access to a full terabyte of storage space.

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