Tag: home

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Solar panels for sensor nodes

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Intro For a while now, I started replacing the dead AA(A) batteries in my sensor nodes with rechargeable NiMH ones. So, since these batteries are rechargeable, I thought, why not trying adding small solar panels for sensor nodes, where light is abundant. Node 27: outside sensor Purpose: outside temperature, humidity, light, pressure sensor. Powered by 2 x AAA 500mAh from Ikea. The solar cell is rated 3V, 125mA and is pointing vertically south and costs… Continue reading

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Stop it with the coin cells!

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Hey companies making sensors and remotes! (for smart home/home automation and the likes). If you can make a sensor microscopic – fine If it needs to be portable – fine But if it is rather small, but still visible you are not doing anyone any favor by making it as small as possible with a coin cell battery that runs just a few months or even less. If your sensor can run for years and… Continue reading

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Wet sensors (or humidity sensor troubles)

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Intro Well there is no surprise: i went through a lot of temperature and humidity sensors. Some I already reported on, and some more i tried afterwards. And none seem to survive the exterior readout very well. The defects are mostly related to humidity, but not temperature. What happens when they fail: mostly the humidity saturates to 100%. Here is my most recently replaced one from outside, a BME280: After a while, the sensor reads… Continue reading

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Step up from 1 AA cell – again

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Intro A while ago I have evaluated the powering options for my smart home sensor nodes. One thing was really clear: I would try to avoid small batteries and using anything else besides the common AA(A) sizes. This makes nodes last a long time on a battery that is easy and cheap to find. And I was right about this – the plethora of commercial remotes and sensors that I also used (like the ikea ones)… Continue reading

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10002 The hidden database

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A long due update A while back I setup influx DB to store the sensor and activity data on my smart home system. And i thought the raspberry pi 3 was not enough to run the server anymore. And moved to a NUC and all was fine. But recently I wanted to upgrade from Ubuntu 18 to 20 and thought about making an image of the SSD first, as a quick and easy way to… Continue reading

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Ikea TRÅDFRI review

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Intro Part of my home automation project I would have some controllable lights, of course. On one hand, I used quite a few LED strips, controlled by dimmer modules. On the other, current technology allows for a plethora of wireless light bulbs.  Philips HUE is probably the biggest and best known because it has existed for quite a long time, but I am not that attracted due to the price. Once Ikea came up with… Continue reading

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10002 I2C connectors

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Intro In my first iteration of sensors I relied on wire connections between sensors and the actual node board. The result for a motion sensor and a temperature and humidity sensor looks like this The problem with that is that during sensor modules assembly run I spend quite a bit of time on the wiring. On top of that, the result is a mess of small wires inside a box. It makes it hard to… Continue reading

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10002 Screens and controls

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Intro There is no point in having a smart home if you don’t see interesting information or control things. The traditional way, ever since the concept of smart home came to be, is to have some sort of central control panel for everything. In today’s world, that would be a tablet. In my attempt to do that, I ran into the control panel horror. What else? In parallel to this, I thought about the idea… Continue reading

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10002 Zen

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Zen At some point I though about building the smallest PCB for a sensor node that I could. Hence, the ZEN was born. The PCB is small enough to fit on a holder of 2 AA batteries. Where I have only build a few of these. Here is one reading the soil moisture sensor on basil. Here is another one chilling in the fridge, reading a temperature sensor. And here is one replacing the alarm… Continue reading

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10002 Motion sensors?

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Motion sensor madness Picking the right one for my smart home project is not trivial. From left to right – Osram Nightlux, Ikea Molgan, Ebay sensors with sensitivity and timing adjusment (BISS001), smaller ebay sensor with no adjustment, another ebay sensor. As you can see I have looked at 2 different options: use a ready made sensor and fit it with a radio, or build my own. Ikea Molgan I hacked one a while ago –… Continue reading