This sensor node is attached to the gas meter in my home. It uses a 2,4 GHz RF link to a MySensors MQTT gateway to reports natural gas consumption data to my home automation controller. The gas meter is of the type that creates magnetic pulses when the meter dial moves, so the connection is contact-less, and works without access to the inside of the “official” meter from the utility company.
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MyMotionSensor – a MySensors based sensor for motion and ambient light level
I needed a couple of motions sensors to automate lighting in hallways and other rooms. Since the lights should only turn on when it is dark, the system also needs to know the ambient light level in the location where the motion was detected — so I added a simple brightness sensor to each node.
Continue readingWeather-mood-alarm-light
When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, the lamp on my bedside table also turns on, to help me wake up, and its color indicates outside temperature: from red for warm through yellow and green to blue and violet for “it’s freezing outside”.
Continue readingMy Home Automation story, part 3: actual benefits and lessons learned
In the previous parts of this series I described my objectives for and anticipated benefits of my home automation system (part 1), and described the implementation (part 2). Now let’s have a look at which of the anticipated benefits I am really seeing today, after several years of use. I will also share some technical “lessons learned”.
Continue readingMy Home Automation story, part 2: Implementation
In part 1 of this series I told you about my objectives for and anticipated benefits of a home automation system. Today, in part 2, I’ll describe what I actually built. Part 3 will look at the real benefits of the system, after several years of use, and share some lessons learned.
Continue readingMy Home Automation story, part 1: Objectives
I decided to install some IoT equipment as an experiment, primarily to see if/how “home automation” would affect my behavior and decisions in daily life. I am basically using myself as a guinea pig, to study how technology will affect daily routine … and as a nice side effect, I get to dabble in electronics and embedded software!
Let me share with you how I designed and implemented a home automation solution in my house. The focus of these posts is not just on technology, on how I did it, but also on why I did it: what were my objectives? What were the expected vs the real benefits? Are there any lessons learned? This is about sharing my experience in defining and building something, not giving you my opinions on what you should want.
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