New Adventures in WiFi

After  finally getting Tasmota flashed onto a smart plug  I was able to get started on one of the smart home projects I'd been pondering for a while... a smart phone charger that could stop the phone charging when it reached a certain battery charge level. My motivation was this... I had been the owner of a Google Pixel phone which I purchased in 2017. After 2 years of use I was becoming increasingly disappointed with the battery life of the device, which prompted me to install the AccuBattery app  to attempt to quantify how poor the remaining battery capacity was. I was alarmed to find that the battery capacity was less than 50% of the original capacity (and has now dropped to less than 40% at the time of writing) So after I got a new Android phone in around May 2019, I started reading about how I could improve this. The AccuBattery documentation has some very useful articles  describing how lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries degrade under different charging...

I'm going to write a few retrospective posts here about some of the beginnings of my smart home obsession. My first foray into the the world of home-smartening occurred at the time we installed solar panels on our house. At the same time, I purchased some CurrentCost EnviR  monitoring device (which can be seen below) to record the solar generation data, and also our household consumption data. The device comes with current clamps for the solar and mains wiring in the switchboard, and a couple of RF senders which send the signal to the display above. At the time I also bought a NetSmart hub which allowed the display to send data directly to the CurrentCost website, for viewing and monitoring. Unfortunately the CurrentCost website was poor for viewing the data, so I was able to pull the data from CurrentCost into a service called Cosm (previously called Pachube and later Xiveley) and then to PVOutput , which is an excellent service for viewing and monitoring el...