Struggling to get the ESP32 to boot. First problem - solder bridges on the USB connector!!!

MBus ESP32 Adapter Update – Voltage Booster now works! This is a short update on the MBus ESP32 adapter I'm building. I wrong a long post about it over here, which I suggest you read first to give you some context. When I designed the original circuit, I made two mistakes in the schematic. Each…

MBus ESP32 Adapter Update – Voltage Booster now works!

This is a short update on the MBus ESP32 adapter I'm building. I wrong a long post about it over here, which I suggest you read first to give you some context. When I designed the original circuit, I made two mistakes in the schematic. Each mistake impacted a different part of my circuit. In this post I want to talk about the Voltage Booster.

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Revision F of my MBus adapters have arrived from @pcbwayofficial.bsky.social - speedy delivery as always!

My energy manager was working very well, but all of a sudden, it lost connection to everything :(

MBus Adapter Revision F. This includes a little rework to the voltage booster layout, to fix my schematic mistake with the inductor and diode. I'm going to look at this again before I send of for manufacturing.

Dang. Found another mistake in my MBus board, this time with the schematic. The connection to the SW of the AP3015 should be between the inductor and the diode, not after it. Agggg!

Revision E is ready to rock. Big changes to this, moving some of the components around and increasing trace sizes for the 36V MBus parts of the circuit. Still nervous about this one. Using @pcbwayofficial.bsky.social again.

Due to a mistake in my MBus PCB, I decided to try just the ESP32 part. I soldered on some of the components and the ESP32. I used too much paste, so had to do a little clean up with braided copper. Blink worked first time, which was nice!

My latest YouTube video: No Hub Needed! Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay youtu.be/4279At06XYE

No Hub Needed! Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay

YouTube video by Tomas McGuinness

youtu.be

Automatic delay of my SmartThings Samsung Washing Machine The testing of my Energy Manager continues at home and to be honest, it hasn't been going too well. Both myself and my wife simply *forget* that we need be checking the energy manager. The number one offender was the washing machine as we'd…

Automatic delay of my SmartThings Samsung Washing Machine

The testing of my Energy Manager continues at home and to be honest, it hasn't been going too well. Both myself and my wife simply *forget* that we need be checking the energy manager. The number one offender was the washing machine as we'd load it and hit start without even thinking. Changing this habit was going to be harder than I expected.

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My heat pump power is wired in! One step closer!

Got Claude to one-shot some ESP32 firmware that connects to the SmartThings API and lists my appliances. Not a bad start.

New blog post: Investigating Cooling with an air-to-water Air Source Heat Pump tomasmcguinness.com/2026/07/17/i...

Investigating Cooling with an air-to-water Air Source Heat Pump

My ASHP heat pump is due to be installed in less than a month (Aug 2026)! I’m getting a Kronoterm Adapt to replace my big, stupid gas boiler. The Kronoterm app has an Augment Reality feature …

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No Hub Needed! Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay youtu.be/4279At06XYE

No Hub Needed! Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay

YouTube video by Tomas McGuinness

youtu.be

My latest video is up! I’m using an AI thumbnail. What do you think? Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay youtu.be/4279At06XYE

Using Matter Bindings with the Shelly 1 Smart Relay

YouTube video by Tomas McGuinness

youtu.be

These AI thumbnails are getting scary. Look at the expression it was able to put on my face. Scary.

Just started looking at the Smart Things API. It doesn't even offer the Device OAuth flow. That's not a good start.

Finally got Matter groups working pretty reliably in my Matter Controller. Video should drop this Friday.

Got some Benchdogs Parallel guides. Excited to try this out. Getting equal parallel cuts on sheet material is really hard for me. This should help enormously.

As my heat pump installation date starts to get closer, I’m getting nervous I messed something up!

My machine leaning is predicting we’ll have surplus PV around 11am. Battery is almost full. Solar diverter will then kick in. I need to go backways through this data and see how well my machine is predicting.

I haven't got my heat pump installed yet, but I'm already planning how I'm going to do cooling with it. I need to get some measurements from the loft and start planning!

Building an M-Bus Adapter with onboard ESP32 This is my Kamstrup Heat Meter. It currently measures how much heat my boiler is producing. It's been a very useful addition to my heating setup and has featured in some of my videos. Introducing my Heat Meter Calculating my home's heat loss using a…

Building an M-Bus Adapter with onboard ESP32

This is my Kamstrup Heat Meter. It currently measures how much heat my boiler is producing. It's been a very useful addition to my heating setup and has featured in some of my videos. Introducing my Heat Meter Calculating my home's heat loss using a Heat Meter My big, stupid boiler Installed back in October 2023, this little device has been diligently working away.

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I faced an issue commissioning a Matter over Thread device from my Home Energy Manager. In this post, I work through the problem before finally resolving it.

Matter Commissioning issues with Thread on Ethernet with ESP32-P4

I encountered a problem commissioning a Matter over Thread device using the esp-matter SDK on an ESP32-P4. Despite initial success, the P4 failed to establish a connection due to a missing route to the Thread device. After extensive debugging, they discovered the P4 wasn't listening for Router Advertisement packets, which was resolved by joining the multicast group, allowing successful commissioning.

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My Matter Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that helps maximum self-consumption of solar PV #energy #matter #smarrhome youtu.be/XD34O_0BNjM

My Matter Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that helps maximum self-consumption of solar PV

YouTube video by Tomas McGuinness

youtu.be

I have finally deactivated my X account. I really need to start taking account for the services I support.

Claude Design is very powerful for somebody like me. I know what I want, but I don't have any design flair what-so-ever! Asked it to produce a simple heat pump style schematic.

Over the past week and a half, I put together a new PCB. This one (I hope) will combine an M-Bus interface with an ESP32-C6. I hope to use it to connect to my Heat Meter and to expose the data as a Matter device.

Matter Controller – Group Commands In this post, I look at how I added group commands to my ESP32 Matter Controller. Matter Grouping allows different devices to be logically grouped together so they can all be controlled together. For example, you have multiple smart bulbs in your kitchen, and you…

Matter Controller – Group Commands

In this post, I look at how I added group commands to my ESP32 Matter Controller. Matter Grouping allows different devices to be logically grouped together so they can all be controlled together. For example, you have multiple smart bulbs in your kitchen, and you want them to all turn on or off at the flick of a switch. Normal Matter commands are sent directly between nodes.

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Played with Bindings and Groups in Matter this morning. It's only half working though :(