iot

Time flies so we always have to know it precisely. Plain old manually synchronized clocks are good but I’m tired of their inaccuracy and season based mandatory shift still not cleared EU wide. So I wanted to find a nice and handy wall clock without these drawbacks.

First, I went with DCF77 clocks but there is no strong enough signal inside the rooms here. I had a pet project to build an ESP controller based DCF77 transmitter just strong enough to cover my flat. Beyond the potential legal problems can be caused by a permanent 77.5 kHz radio transmitter, because of the lack of radio related knowledge this project was stopped after a while.

Finally, I found some nice internet based wall clocks on Ebay and Aliexpress so I bought a few. Later I noticed all of them were built on top of ESP microcontrollers. Great opportunities to customize. Right?

Nowadays everything is smart. Everything is connected to the Internet. Everything can be controlled remotely. But what about utility meters? I wanted to know how to gather data from electricity-, water- and gas meters as frequently as possible. First, I decided to study electricity meters as they seem the easiest. At the time of writing this article, I live in Hungary. I will try to emphesize all the time when I am writing about country specific things.