Intro In my initial thoughts about the smart home system architecture, the server was most likely a raspberry pi: At that time it seemed the PI was apt for it. And a raspberry pi 2 served me well for a while, and then I moved to a pi 3 and everything was good. Until it was not enough… What happened? I had mosquitto and node-red as the main things running. And I added some simple… Continue reading
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
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
Intro It is quite clear that my smart home project is going quite slow and erratic. Following the other assembly, I made another batch of 5 sensor nodes. These are meant to use the new soil sensors, once they arrive. Since plants will be both outside and inside and we are talking about rain and water, the sensors will go into waterproof boxes, with the soil sensor connected via a cable. So, this assembly is due… Continue reading
Brief progress It is quite clear that my smart home project is going quite slow. It is not that I spent a lot a time on it, but that I have been pretty busy with other life things. But it is moving again now. Check out another batch of assembly. Motion sensors assembly Once I settled on the type of motion sensor and case, I designed some sensor PCBs . I made a small assembly… Continue reading
I wanted to have a hexapod robot for a long while now. It just never seemed to be that much of a priority to spend the time or money to build one. Luckily this changed when I found Vorpal. They are selling complete kits or you can build one yourself from the plans that are provided. I was missing only a few servos and the 3D printed pieces, so I quickly decided to build one.… Continue reading
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
Intro There is no doubt, that integrated temperature and humidity sensors are the way to go at the moment for my smart home project. I had quite a bit of look at a wide range of sensors and settled for the SI7021. Silabs has a bigger family – most likely the same chip binned on precision – so here are cheaper options to use if I ever want to go for an application that can do with… Continue reading
This article is part of my 1000² Smart Home project. Check out the Architecture and Software and then move on to Hardware. An most importantly, check the Lessons learned and why I did what I did. There are already some first results, connecting all parts of the system. Starting with a top down approach – what the system should do, it soon became clear that some devices will be custom and some will be off the shelf. Determining… Continue reading
This article is part of my 1000² Smart Home project. Check out the Architecture and Software and then move on to Hardware. An most importantly, check the Lessons learned and why I did what I did. There are already some first results, connecting all parts of the system. Intro There is plenty of software to use in home automation, but of course I decided to stay with open source and free options. In recent years there have been… Continue reading