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Saving a Fail-Safe Motorized Valve
Even “fail-safe” components have an expiration date. After eight years of flawless service, a critical motorized valve in my setup failed to close. This post dives into the internal “magic” of supercapacitors and gearboxes, why a secondary safety layer (and Loxone) saved my wallet, and a step-by-step guide to upgrading your valves with a €3 replacement part.
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Somfy Glydea and Loxone
Here is how I automated the electric curtains with Loxone. Having a motorized curtains in living room was not the the initial plan at first place. So I had nothing prepared for this in terms of wiring or any setup. Only this year we have decided to have a curtains on the big sliding door Read more
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Shelly Plug S works amazingly with Loxone
Shelly Plug S is a neat and tiny WiFi Plug that is very feature rich and has been designed by clever developers. I am really impressed about the overall design and SW capabilities this “smart” device offers. Unlike other “smart products” that forces you into vendor specific ecosystem (App, Cloud, ..), with Shelly the real Read more
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sDock tablet wall mount
If you are looking for a nice and practical wall mount for your iPad tablet that is easy to use, has built in charging option and can do a 90° pivot, look no further. I think I found perfect solution. At home we are using one tablet primarily dedicated to the central control of our Read more
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Solenoid valve control (update)
This post is an update of an earlier article I did for garden irrigation. The main reason for this update is an additional section/solenoid valve added to the system which I want to control with Loxone. In the previous design I used three of the extension relays outputs (one relay per solenoid). With the newly Read more
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EnOcean push buttons and actuators
EnOcean is well known low power wireless standard and as a technology it is being integrated into wide range of home automation solutions, either as an integral part of the smart home ecosystem, or as an standalone wireless technology used for some sort of dedicated remote control (blinds, garage door, remote wall switch, …). It Read more
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Intergating 12V devices into 24V system
Home automation systems like Loxone do require 24V DC power supply. In most cases the infrastructure is fed by one separate PSU unit, which has some kind of power outage protection (UPS, either on its primary side AC, or the DC side), and is separated from the other high-consumption components (like LED strips, valves, locks, Read more