My ATTEN 858D hot air gun suddenly began tripping the residual-current device in my home office. Let’s investigate! 👇

My mom has a miniature elf house that she takes out every Christmas, and it has become a tradition that all her grandkids partake in the elves moving in. She has tried to mount lights in it before, using a battery powered LED strip, but the lights turned out too bright, and the light was pretty cold. So I ordered some orange flickering candle-like LEDs from eBay and got to work 🙂

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.

This project is an improvement to my previous Lync status light, built back in May 2016. It worked fine, but it only had three 5 mm LEDs. People who knew about the module noticed, but many people didn’t, so it did not have the effect I was looking for. That’s why I decided to upgrade it, and this time use bigger and brighter lights!

A while back my kids got this SOS station toy, it came with a few emergency cars and the boys quite liked it. My girl friend and myself however; hated it, it had a speaker and made a high siren sound and an annoying voice would shout things like “all cars respond”. So I modified it; ripped out the speaker and mounted a few LEDs instead, so now it flashes but no sound.

Bias lighting is, simply put, to light up the wall behind a monitor or TV. It creates a glow around the screen and, supposedly, creates a more comfortable and high contrast viewing experience. I made my bias lighting by merely sticking a LED-strip behind the TV.

My two twin boys are pretty into Fireman Sam these days, so the red walking car they got when they were babies got an upgrade. Four blue self-flashing LEDs, a toggle switch and a 2xAA battery holder; everything bought cheap on eBay. And voila! A fire truck with blue emergency lights.

My nephew, and my twin boys, both have a Ikea play kitchen. It’s a pretty cool toy, with a microwave, oven, sink, cabinets and hot plates. The plates have LEDs so they turn red when turned on, just to make it a bit more real. But the play kitchen is even greater with some lights!

My brother-in-law is into RC car drifting, and a big part of that is of course to have a cool-looking car! He used a LED light kit, but the front lights were not that great. Very blueish and the intensity of the LEDs varied quite a bit.

So I replaced the LEDs and installed some fog lights, it ended up quite decent looking I think 🙂

When I am at work, I use headphones; a lot. About half the time I am listening to music, the other half I am talking with someone on Lync (Skype for Business). That made it difficult for my colleagues to know whether I am available or not, so I get interrupted when I’m on the phone. I needed a way to communicate my availability!