We have a Raspberry Pi driven digital calendar in the kitchen. I’m currently using crontab to turn the HDMI port off at night, and when we’re at work.

But a much more flexible solution is to control it using MQTT and Home Assistant. That way it can easily be automated to turn on when we’re home, if there is movement in the kitchen, or any number of conditions.

It’s really quite easy to do, here’s how 👇

My kids wanted traffic lights for their LEGO city, so first I had to build a traffic lights controller.

I made a simple HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi to read multiple DS18B20 temperature sensors — it was surprisingly easy. I used the measured temperatures to control a fan using Home Assistant.

My twin boys are, like their dad, fascinated by switches and flashing lights. I needed an excuse to use the Raspberry Pi Zero in a project, so I built them a WiFi MQTT controlled alarm module. With a couple of switches, some panel indicators, a buzzer, and a blue LED strobe.

I’ve wanted to use an ESP8266 WiFi module in a project for some time now, and after reading about the WeMos board, I figured this was the easiest way to get started. The WeMos D1 mini is quite small and much easier to interact with and program than the ESP8266 devices. So I built this single relay controller, with internal temperature reporting. I am communicating with it using MQTT, which makes it really easy to implement it into things like Home Assistant.