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Monitoring Home

2013-11-20

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Introduction

The requirements for my monitoring projects are simple:

  • Want to be mostly cabling free.

One of the things than makes a good monitoring system at home is don't having to make new cabling all around the house each time you put a new sensor or want to check a new temperature room.

  • Want to use open-source products.

There are several reasons for that. Despite what most people think that we use open-source because is free (like free beer ;-)) in my case is not true. The fact of using open-source products is because the support, the driver availability, the modifications to adapt the product, etc. etc. Several times I did donations to products so at the end, has never be free as a free beer.

Requirements

  • Cheap sensors for temperature, humidity, electrical power consumption, digital status, barometric pressure,
  • Long distances > 20 meters
  • Cheap controllers.
  • Easy deployment
  • Mobile, distance and independent data display
  • Database for making complex requests if needed

Hardware

  • Sensors: DS18B20 with isolation for the heating system, normal one for standard temperatures, DHT21 for temperature and hygrometers, counters and opto-couplers  for electrical consumption, BMP085 Barometric Pressure,
  • Arduino Models: Uno, Mega, Mini Pro, Yún
  • Raspberry Pi: Version 2, 512 Model
  • Servers: Mac mini Server, Standard Desktop PC, HP Proliant.
  • Electronics: 433 Mhz radio transmitters, relays, resistors, diodes, etc.
  • Screens and displays: TV, Standard screens, 1.8" TFT LCD Displays, Car Cameras

Software

  • ARM Compilers for Arduino, Raspberry Pi.
  • Raspbian
  • Debian with LAMP
  • Mac OS X with LAMP
  • MySQL, SQLite, RRDtools Databases

In the next posts I'll explain all the projects.