Smart Home
Now that I have finally got round to getting a blog up and running I can start posting about some of the things I’ve been tinkering with...
The last time I played around with micro-controllers, LED and resistors was in university so during the winter of 2015, when I started thinking about starting a hobby to pass the time, I decided to get an Arduino Starter Kit. I thought it would be a nice way to refresh my memory and expose my kids to the world of electronics. They liked the flashing lights and buzzing noises but got bored with typing code into the Arduino IDE.
I, however, was hooked and started looking for something to build. IoT being all the rage, I decided to try and make my home "Smart".
While doing my research I came across MySensors, a web site focusing on do-it-yourself home automation and Internet of Things. Thanks to their excellent guides I was eventually able to build a small network of temperature and humidity sensors that communicated with a MQTT gateway using NRF24L01+ radios
For the server side of things I opted to go with OpenHAB v2 running on an Ubuntu virtual server. Because I was building the system during the transition from v1 to v2, the documentation available was a bit confusing so getting a decent OpenHAB interface running was challenging. That did, however, have the side effect of teaching me more about OpenHAB than I thought I needed to know.
My home didn't get smarter but learnt quite a bit about the MQTT protocol, wireless radios, Arduino programming and capturing and displaying sensor data. I also found out that Amazon and eBay have made it really easy to get cheap components for prototyping from China, though you sometimes have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery.
The last time I played around with micro-controllers, LED and resistors was in university so during the winter of 2015, when I started thinking about starting a hobby to pass the time, I decided to get an Arduino Starter Kit. I thought it would be a nice way to refresh my memory and expose my kids to the world of electronics. They liked the flashing lights and buzzing noises but got bored with typing code into the Arduino IDE.
I, however, was hooked and started looking for something to build. IoT being all the rage, I decided to try and make my home "Smart".
While doing my research I came across MySensors, a web site focusing on do-it-yourself home automation and Internet of Things. Thanks to their excellent guides I was eventually able to build a small network of temperature and humidity sensors that communicated with a MQTT gateway using NRF24L01+ radios
For the server side of things I opted to go with OpenHAB v2 running on an Ubuntu virtual server. Because I was building the system during the transition from v1 to v2, the documentation available was a bit confusing so getting a decent OpenHAB interface running was challenging. That did, however, have the side effect of teaching me more about OpenHAB than I thought I needed to know.
As always with my projects, I try to get my kids involved. This time, they had a lot of fun decorating the boxes we were going to use to keep the sensors in. This way, the sensors blended into their rooms quite nicely.
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| DHT22 and Arduino Uno R3 based temperature and humidity sensor in a unique, custom designed enclosure |
My home didn't get smarter but learnt quite a bit about the MQTT protocol, wireless radios, Arduino programming and capturing and displaying sensor data. I also found out that Amazon and eBay have made it really easy to get cheap components for prototyping from China, though you sometimes have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery.
How accurate is your temperature sensor?
ReplyDeleteI used DHT22 sensors because they are cheap and available from many sources. Accuracy was not a primary concern but according to the datasheet (https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/DHT22.pdf) they are accurate to +-0.2 degrees C
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