Category: The BSS Journey

A wicket door is a small pedestrian door built into a larger industrial door — usually a roller shutter or sectional overhead door. You see them quite often in commercial buildings. During working hours, the main roller shutter can be fully opened for deliveries. At other times, people can simply walk through the small wicket…

So I was half way into my BSS Journey, and got stuck between two almost-right solutions. One could open the door, but couldn’t manage users properly.The other could manage users, but couldn’t open the door I needed. It felt like buying a car where one model had an engine but no steering wheel, while the…

Part 4. AWS — The IoT Commanding Centre AWS – Amazon Web Service can be confusing. Most people hear “web” and think of websites — the things we visit every day: BBC News, Amazon, YouTube, or a self storage booking page. Most people use the web every day without thinking about it. We open a…

Part 3: The Struggle with Tuya Encryption As I mentioned in the last chapter, I needed to build my own “Zoom connection” to remotely monitor and control the noisy classroom. But how? My programming knowledge went back to a one-year university course in 1992 — and even then, I spent less than six hours on…

Part 2: What Is a Tuya Developer Account? and Why Do I Need It? After the embarrassing dinner incident in Chapter 20, I hesitated for a few more days. Eventually, I reached three conclusions. First, enough was enough. I was not paying the freelancer another penny. Second, finding another developer didn’t feel safe either. I…

Part 1: The Light That Wouldn’t Stay On In Chapter 14, I mentioned that I decided to take a completely different approach to building an automated self-storage facility. Instead of traditional control systems, I planned to use smart cameras, smart lighting, and a cloud server to run everything. To make this work, I hired an…

Part 4: Industrial Roof and Wall Cladding In the UK, residential houses usually have small concrete-tiled roofs. Industrial buildings, on the other hand, use vast fibre-cement or metal sheets. The difference in materials isn’t surprising.The difference in cost certainly is. A few years ago, I replaced the entire roof on my house for under £10,000.…

Part 3: Removing Walls and Rewiring Merit House may look tired, but structurally it’s solid — reinforced concrete columns and floors, built in an era when overengineering was still fashionable. The first real physical step was simple in theory:remove the internal partition walls and strip the building back to an empty shell. When choosing contractors,…

Part 2: The Planning Permission Merit House was built in the 1960s as a beer factory. Over time it became a sign-making workshop — Merit Badges — and eventually picked up the name Merit House.(Yes, I could have renamed it Allcam House or BSS House. No, I didn’t bother.) From the start, the building carried…