I’ve found a new gadget that I’m genuinely excited about. The Pill from Shelly is a tiny little USB powered thing that you can plug sensors into and advertise the values over BLE
A little bit of time travel
I have a Stupid Car
and I’ve always had trouble with temperatures under the bonnet.
Over the years I’ve tried to interface to DS18B20 sensors in various ways. It started with Raspberry Pi(s) which required a lot of effort not to kill with car voltages and shutdown.
After running up a bill of dead Pis, I started playing with ESP32s. Much more robust and much cheaper. It did become complicated when I started running a mobile wifi network and publishing data over MQTT. If you ever wondered why MSDroid mad MQTT functionality, it was this.
However that was all a major pain in the nuts with an excessive number of moving parts. There was a time when Wireguard and My Home Assistant setup were involved. Bonkers.
I’m now working on VETuner and as that is browser based that immediately negates any realistic chance of a network connection. Chrome supports Web Bluetooth which lets code running in the browser talk to BLE devices.
Back to today
I was idly browsing the Shelly website looking for energy monitoring devices I could put into the wall socket when I came across The Pill. TL;DC a 3 gramme widget that you can plug up to 5 DS18B20 sensors into and get readings from them over BLE. It arrived today and I’m now updating VETuner to read them. Then I need to actually place the sensors back in the car.
This thing is £8!