Categories
Smart Home

My Experiment: Building an EV Wallbox Smart Home Integration with AI Coding Agents

Having an NRGkick mobile wallbox from the Austrian company DiniTech, I decided to integrate it into a new project. The wallbox has a local API (so controlling it does not need the internet) and exposes over 80 sensors / data points. This includes basics like charging current and total energy, and even the individual temperatures of the charging phase connectors. This is a perfect playground for smart home integration.

My main goal was not just to visualize this data in Home Assistant. I wanted to control the rest of the home based on the wallbox’s charging status. This is useful for a home with a photovoltaic (PV) system that is not big enough to support full car charging and other large appliances (like heating) at the same time. Controlling the wallbox itself (setting current, pausing) was also an important benefit, especially if you don’t have the PV-led charging add-on for the wallbox.

Home Assistant integration for NRGkick
Over 80 sensors and data points are exposed from the NRGkick wallbox and integrated into Home Assistant through the new custom integration.

This project was also an experiment to test the current state of AI coding agents. I wanted to see if they could build a full, high-quality Home Assistant integration from scratch. I used GitHub Copilot inside Visual Studio Code and tested several different models.

You can download and try the full integration from GitHub, and it’s also available for direct installation into your Home Assistant setup through the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) – search for “NRGkick”; the actual configuration then works through auto-discovery in your local network. Also visit the Home Assistant Community forum discussion if you have feedback or comments!

Categories
Digital Healthcare

Reading Blood Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Pulse through MySignals / Arduino

The MySignals HW BLE v2 – eHealth and Medical IoT Development Platform for Arduino contains sensors that measure more than 20 biometric parameters. One of the most interesting is the Bluetooth LE SpO2 sensor. How to get started reading live data and visualizing it on the TFT display of the board?

What is the MySignals HW Kit?

The MySignals HW kit contains a shield that requires an Arduino Uno as base. In contrast to the (more expensive) MySignals SW kit, the HW kit is rather basic. Powering it up results in a white screen, instead of a nice interface on the screen. The rest is up to the software developer. As the development is based on Arduino, you need the latest version of the Arduino IDE.