Ananthan's Blog

If you are a geek, then you definitely want to mess with everything to create something cool out of it. What about controlling all of your appliances from your computer or from your smart phone wirelessly? Set timer for light when you go to sleep; autonomously switch your fan on when temperature exceeds; and when you are too lazy to get up from your bed to switch fan/light off. All you need is an ESP8266 with a couple of other components that cost <10$. Kind of lazy to always go and switch OFF the lights/Fans especially when sleepy :-). So 3 days straight and it's done... 2 days is spend to understand and change the firmware of WiFi chip ESP 8266. (You can add an extra micro controller along with ESP 8266, but what's the fun in it? ) Made ESP 8266 ES01 chip to act as a TCP server and also to control the Relay circuit (Changed the firmware and programmed it). Control messages are interpreted and necessary signals are passed to the Relay circuit. AC to DC converte...

For a long time I have been trying to configure port forwarding using NAT. But every attempt was futile...  Finally I found that my port forwarding works just fine. But it just appears to be not working because my router doesn't support reverse NAT. In this post I will show you guys how to test whether you configure your NAT correctly or not. (Read a detailed write up by shane. Link ) First make a port forwarding rule in your router say 1600. Download this little tool called simple internet tools. Install it and open port listener and select your internal IP(192.168.x.x). Then type your port number and press start listening. Go to this site  and check whether it says port is opened. If your connection is successful you will notice it in the port listener application. Then go to your browser and type your internet ip address. (You can find it from www.whatismyip.com) . Tnen type your port number after a colon. (116.211.22.12:1600). Your browser shows a webpage not availa...

Wonder how the dns works or want to know the dns reply from server? Sometimes when setting up a local dns server we have to test whether it is working or not. Here is how you can test it in Linux. dig @127.0.0.1 www.google.com