About Kilomon


Dan at Kilomon is a Systems Engineer with years of experience in datacenter infrastructure and cloud deployment, management, automation, and optimization.

Dan is blogging on his daily work and hobbies he enjoys.

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Hacking the Sonoff Wifi Switch - Part 1

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Making the Sonoff Easy to Program The release of the ESP8266 has generated a lot of interest in the microcontroller community. Nodemcu and other cheap MCU's with built in wifi have really opened the door for consumers/makers to create cost effective IoT solutions. One significant reason ESP8266 based devices are taking off is due to the fact that Arduino libraries have been created and are well maintained. Sonoff Wifi Switches, which are based on the ESP8266, are getting a lot of attention and for good reason. They are cheap and very hackable.  I should mention that Sonoff has its own cloud service for controlling these wireless switches .  Here is my take on hacking the Sonoff. Go to Part 2 Go to Part 3 Overview I have been playing around with a small DIY aquaponics system in my home office. So far its a success, but I would like to have more control. Currently, I have 2 Sonoff wireless switches (both with custom code) controlling grow lights and aquarium
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Hacking the Sonoff Wifi Switch - Part 3 Alexa Smart Home

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Controlling Sonoff with Alexa This post will build our previous work with the Sonoff Wifi Switch. We'll focus on using an Arduino library called fauxmo to allow Alexa to interact with the Sonoff. Go to Part 1 Go to Part 2 Overview I have been controlling appliances such as lights and aquaponics equipment using MQTT with Node-RED and also Blynk. Both work well. When I recieved an Echo Plus as a gift for Christmas I quickly understood the potential that the Alexa service had. It is simple to use and for those of us that like getting under the hood, functional short comings can be overcome with the creation of Alexa Skills and some type of internet accessible service to handle logic and automation (AWS Lambda, Node-RED, etc).  Echo Dot can be had a reasonable price currently. You can also keep tabs on the Alexa development pages. They have been giving out Echo Dot's to Skill creators that meet certain criteria. This guide will use the FauxmoESP library
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Creating Alexa Skills for IoT and Nodemcu - Part 2 AWS IoT

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Connecting Nodemcu to AWS IoT This is part two of a series of posts showing how I setup a AWS based solution to allow Alexa to read data collected by Nodemcu with DHT temperature and humidity sensors. The design is discussed in part one of this series. Go to Part 1 - Design Overview I recommend reviewing my first post in this series, so you can understand the gameplan... but here's the short version. We will create and configure three separate services in AWS. An Alexa Skill for voice commands, a AWS Lambda function that will act as a middle man, and AWS IoT for storing the current state of the Nodemcu sensors. DISCLAIMER: This guide uses a work around to allow Nodemcu to communicate directly with AWS IoT. The work around uses API keys that will be written in cleartext on the Nodemcu. Proceed at your own discretion. Goals Configure an IoT Thing Setup a security policy and user that can write data to the Thing Shadow via the REST API Ensure the policy limits ac
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