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 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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Hacking the Sonoff Wifi Switch - Part 2

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Programming the Sonoff Wifi Switch In my last post, I showed how to mod the Sonoff Wifi Switch for easy programming using Arduino (or any other ESP8266 programming utility). In this post, I'll show how I setup my physical programming hardware and get custom code onto the Sonoff using the Arduino IDE. Go to Part 1 Go to Part 3 Overview Programming the ESP8266 based Sonoff is relatively simple. It will require a connection between the Sonoff and the programmer, which in this case is a PC, Raspberry PI, or Mac. A simple, cheap USB to Serial UART adapter will connect the computer to the Sonoff for programming. A WORD OF CAUTION : These devices are designed to work on your home mains power. You should understand the implications of connecting a device you altered to mains power. Do not ever work on a device that is connect to a mains power source. Do not attempt to program the Sonoff while it is connected to a mains power source. Goals Make an easy method to
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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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