Homy 2.0

After a couple of years of the uninterrupted operation, I decided to retire the existing home automation and replace it with the new one. Since the technology available to the amateurs today is much more affordable, both when it comes to the simplicity of the use and integration but also the price. It is easy for the enthusiasts to combine the state of the art stuff like WiFi and LoRaWAN communication, open source home automation software, ESP8266, Arduino, …

In this post, I describe the various upgrades I have performed on the system during the course of one year.

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Balcony irrigation

A couple of years ago, I have installed the automated irrigation system in our apartment. After running this setup for an year, I have discovered some problems during the everyday operation:

  • due to the small capacity of the water tank, it was required to refill the tank frequently,
  • amount of water delivered to the plants was determined by time (averaged measured value I got with calibration) and was not accurate,
  • it was not possible to irrigate plants independently,
  • couple of times the whole water tank was used for single watering thanks to basic physics in action and lack of the valves.

In a meanwhile I have decided to automate the watering of the balcony plants as well, but also to fix the problems noticed in the first implementation. Continue reading “Balcony irrigation”

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Monitoring temperature and humidity

For almost a year I was playing with various temperature sensors and Arduino. Initially the plan was do use some cheap DHT11 sensors in order to measure soil moisture. After running number of tests I found this method not so reliable. Then, I put a number of DHT11 sensors in the house in order to measure temperature and humidity. Out of 10 sensors, only 2-3 were detecting correct temperatures. Then I tried DHT11’s bigger brother DHT22. The results were much better.

The idea for this project was simple and already seen in number of different projects around the Internet:

  • install a wireless node in every room of the house and collect temperature and humidity,
  • send this data to the central node (using the same (upgraded) central node described in previous posts),
  • store data in database,
  • display data (web page, iPhone notifications).

System overview is displayed in the picture below:

System design
System design
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Homy & Roomba

Roomba has been in our home for some time now. You could even say it a part of the family; it is the liveliest piece of the furniture. We use it for cleaning our apartment and we are pretty happy with it. This cleaning device is a product of iRobot company and the model we have is Roomba 520.

Going around the Internet sites I stumbled upon a nice article about some hardware and software development that includes Roomba – RoombaDecTools. Next thing I dig out was a really nice document that describes technicalities about interfacing Roomba – Roomba Serial Command Interface (SCI) Specification. Everything was clear, a new home project was about to be born 🙂

Our Roomba

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Automated irrigation

After successfully monitoring the plants water levels and needs for some period now, it was finally the time to automate the process of watering as well. The idea was to implement a simple drip watering system with one single water source. Each of the three existing plants would be irrigated proportionally, based on its demands. During the period of couple of weeks, all necessary components arrived and the system was ready to be built.

The main part of the system is a water pump. This is a small 300 l/h submergible electric pump. This was good choice because of its low flow and the fact it can be easily put inside the water tank in the corner of the room.

Water pump

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