Digital garden
Experiments, growing in public
The garden is where my unpolished notes live: experiment logs, measurements and lessons learned. Notes start as seedlings and grow as I come back to tend them.
- SeedlingRough notes and first results
- BuddingTaking shape, still changing
- EvergreenTested and kept up to date
- Seedling MyTrips: clear statistics for your MyToyota trips An Android app that turns trips exported from MyToyota into clear statistics: fuel use and distance month by month, the best and worst trips, and your driving profile. It works fully offline and is in closed testing for now.
- Seedling A vintage photo booth: retro outside, digital inside A photo booth I built myself: wooden and retro on the outside, digital inside, with prints from 10×15 cm to A4 and an online album for guests. Build details still to come.
- Evergreen Yaris IV / Yaris Cross – a compendium on 12 V battery problems Why a hybrid Yaris won’t start after a few days parked, how to check it, and what helps: a bigger battery, charging in Ready mode, a charger, or pulling the DC CUT fuse before a long stay.
- Seedling Pump noise causing false triggers on Raspberry Pi GPIO Just plugging the pump into the socket triggered an interrupt on an input with a long cable. The fix to try: an optocoupler at the Pi end.
- Budding Controlling a Dimplex VFMi storage heater without its original controller Charging and discharging are two independent circuits: a contactor switches the heating elements, a thermostat runs the fan, and the ED signal only caps the charge.
- Budding Quieting a buzzing transformer in an APC Back-UPS CS 500 The charging transformer’s loose core was buzzing. A drop of cyanoacrylate in the gap, and now you can only hear it from a metre away.
- Budding A GPS module sent garbage instead of NMEA: it was RS-232, not TTL Repeatable garbage on the serial port and −5 V on a data line. An RS-232-to-TTL converter fixed it.
- Budding Fixing a tunable-white LED ceiling lamp by replacing its insides The driver in a Wofi tunable-white lamp died. Instead of hunting for the faulty transistor, I fitted a 24 V supply, a CCT controller with a remote and a COB strip – for about 120 PLN.
- Seedling An Android app for RCE energy prices A minimal app that pulls today’s prices from the PSE API and tells you when the cheap-power window starts and ends – so you know when to run the dishwasher.
- Budding Zigbee flood sensors in Home Assistant Aqara sensors on ZHA with a SONOFF coordinator: they work, but need solid coverage and up-to-date coordinator firmware.
- Budding Powering a Raspberry Pi from a 24 V AC irrigation line Rectified 24 V AC gives about 35 V DC – too much for typical buck modules. And the under-voltage warning turned out to be the USB cable’s fault.
- Budding How much power a hybrid inverter burns while doing nothing Around 100 W just to stay on is 2.4 kWh a day. With a small PV system, in winter a home battery can cost more than it saves.