I have a Paradox home security system and I have long wanted to interface with it. I am most interested in its status (armed, disarmed) and the zone statuses. I can use the alarm status to send myself SMS when…
Low power serial keypad
I bought one of these keypads off ebay few days ago, and decided to try it out. These work pretty straight-forward, you have 8 pins – 4 for rows and 4 for columns. When you press a button, it creates…
433Mhz OOK with Funky v2 to remotely control power sockets
Here is a 15 minute project: control 433Mhz RF sockets with the Funky v2: I have a 433Mhz OOK transmitter/receiver, I don’t even recall where I got them. These are widely available on ebay for less than $5 delivered. I…
Raspberry Pi as IP webcam
I noticed this Instructable the other day and had to try it since I had an old USB web cam laying around. I found that the instructions contained some inaccuracies, here are my steps: sudo apt-get install motion sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf Locate…
Plotting my daily travel habbits
Now that I log my location and distance from home, I can visualize this data; Below is a 5-day log on my daily trips – I live around 20km away from the city: I am still not using this data in home…
emonGLCD
Glyn from OpenEnergyMonitor surprised me pleasantly the other day by sending me an emonGLCD unit to evaluate – thanks! Building it was easy, and an hour later I had it working. Quite nice piece of hardware, a must-have for home monitoring…
pChart-ing emoncms data
pChart is a neat PHP charting tool, I have been using prior to switching to emoncms. Emoncms has multigraphs available, that are much more interactive, but they are slow too. I also have had some issues with certain feeds that…
Calculating distance between two GPS coordinates
Now that I have a PHP script that can find out my physical location, I wanted to calculate how far from home I am. Since ‘home’ is a fixed GPS coordinate and my actual position varies, I needed a method…
My Raspberry Pi knows where I am..
Here is a small project with some potential in home automation. I had an idea to create a script, that would track my (and not only) location and use that information to make decisions for home automation. Some ideas: Climate…
Emoncms data on my phone
I wanted to have quick access to certain measurements on my home monitoring system, most important the two hot water tanks (solar and heat pump) temperatures and room temperatures. I could, of course, have my laptop to check these, but…
Funky as remote temperature sensing node with DS18B20
With the winter heating season knocking on the door, I decided to measure the room temperature in every room in the house. The Funky is perfect for the purpose, as a DS18B20 temperature sensor can be soldered directly on its…
RFM12B to Raspberry Pi board
I have decided to discontinue the TinySensor project and focus on Funky Sensor as they overlap a lot as functionality. These of you following my posts, know that I have a working prototype for a dedicated board for RFM12 to Pi connectivity,…
Micro IoT gateway
I have long wanted to make my own Internet of Things gateway and I wanted it small. I have researched for quite a while on the options, and finally decided to base it on the excellent work done by Simon Küppers…
Updating my SMS doorbell
I have made some updates to my SMS doorbell project. Previously, I had troubles setting up the email notifications in emoncms, the problem is that I don’t have shell access to the server where I host it so I could not…
Tiny Sensor plans
I have been working this weekend on improved version of the ATTiny84 remote sensor, this time I will use a PCB fab house to make at least 15 pcs of the PCB. The improvements over the old hand-made PCB are:…