Temperature Monitoring

Forums › Gadgets, robotics, home automation, electronics (including wearables) › Temperature Monitoring

michaelmurfy

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#210393 25-Mar-2017 12:35

I've currently got a little bit of a problem...

So, I live with my Sister and she feels the "cold". We live in a brand new, insulated and double-glazed house. She'll go and turn the heat pump on even when really it isn't cold but also adjust it to something like 26*C. Now, I don't cope with heat too well so had a bit of a plan.

Our heatpump already is one that supports WiFi but I am not attaching a crappy IoT device to it. Instead I am planning on doing this (as it is the same heatpump they're using) and use the same Raspberry Pi as kind of a IoT hub.

What I am after is some cheap temperature + humidity loggers that either talk IP or Zigbee to monitor each room of the house. This way, I can automate the heat pump and also in a way disable her from setting it to an inefficient setting causing a spike in my power bill. This means I could also automate powering up my Xeon workstation before arriving home to heat my room with some Folding@Home.

Has anyone done something like this?

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#1747542 25-Mar-2017 12:48

The Oregon range of temp/humidity sensors are relatively cheap, but they speak RF and you will need an RFXCom USB/LAN adapter, which aren't all that cheap - around EUR100 when I got mine. openHAB has a binding for RFXCom devices so they should just work out of the box. They are discrete and battery powered, I have 2-3 temp sensors around the place feeding into openHAB which then makes decisions about when to heat and where.

Other options are something like the Wemos D1 mini with appropriate shield/sensor but this is more DIY and would need mains power.

The other alternative is Z-Wave. I know you said cheap but if you want the most discrete and useful then you can't go past the Fibaro motion sensor. Cost is up there, and you will need a Z-Wave USB stick to interface with your RPi, but these things work really well, and will give you motion and light readings as well. It doesn't have a humidity sensor but in a modern house like yours I doubt the humidity would fluctuate much anyway.

michaelmurfy

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#1747572 25-Mar-2017 13:48

Excellent thanks @SumnerBoy. Cost isn't too much of an issue. Does OpenHAB run nicely on single board ARM computers?

SumnerBoy

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#1747575 25-Mar-2017 14:10

Absolutely. I would definitely recommend a RPi3 tho, you will have no issues with that.

Once you have openHAB running you will probably find bindings for all sorts of connected devices around your place. E.g. someone just wrote a Unifi binding.

Feel free to ask any questions, happy to help where I can.

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#1747582 25-Mar-2017 14:19

Blue maestro do a Bluetooth temp/humidity sensor a rpi can read from, Or if you can get I close enough a simple dht22 sensor connected to the gpio ports of a pi is another cheap option.

These can either be independent or send data to openHAB (or anything else that accepts mqtt)

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richms

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#1747596 25-Mar-2017 15:10

xiaomi mi sensors off aliexpress are great IMO, and their hub apparantly does MQTT (not tried it as I have the sensors paired to my smart things hub instead)

Richard rich.ms

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#1747599 25-Mar-2017 15:21

I know you aren't interested in IoT, and this could well be overkill, but the Xiaomi smart home bits and pieces are great value for money and communicate via what I think is a custom zigbee protocol to their hub. Their temp/humidity sensors are less than $20 each.

The good thing is that if you enable developer mode then no cloud connection is required - I have home assistant running on a raspberry pi and someone has built a xiaomi library for it, so I have cheap xiaomi temperature monitors, door sensors, motion sensors, push-button switches and power sockets all able to be incorporated into home-assistant automation rules and able to be controlled by my Google Home/Alexa etc.

I link home-assistant to a broadlink IR transmitter which controls my heatpump/stereo etc, and home assistant also plays nicely with my limitless led bulbs, neurio power sensor and miscellaneous other home bits and pieces I have picked up over time.

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tieke

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#1747602 25-Mar-2017 15:26

richms:

xiaomi mi sensors off aliexpress are great IMO, and their hub apparantly does MQTT (not tried it as I have the sensors paired to my smart things hub instead)

Missed you'd mentioned xiaomi - I'd replied before you did, but hadn't noticed that as my submission included a link to an apparently unwelcome chinese site (rhyming with GearNest) it didn't complete :)

SumnerBoy

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#1747704 25-Mar-2017 20:26

Hadn't had a close look at those Xiaomi hubs/sensors - they look very reasonably priced. There seems to be an *original* and *updated* version on AliExpress - anyone know of any differeces? Will v1 sensors work with the v2 hub?

Think I might have to grab some of these and give them a try!

michaelmurfy

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#1747710 25-Mar-2017 20:57

That's what I am looking for - as long as it is able to run without an internet connection (it'll be living on its own VLAN) I am happy so thanks @tieke. I plan on running OpenHAB on an oDroid so should have plenty of grunt for my small house. Looks like I've got my next project planned!

Good to know there are products out there that don't require a cloud connection.

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#1747717 25-Mar-2017 21:15

I will double check the connectivity tomorrow - the initial setup is made via the app, which then coexists happily with home assistant, but I'll double check by disconnecting the internet connection tomorrow to make sure that everything is fine running locally.

SumnerBoy

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#1747719 25-Mar-2017 21:19

Will await your findings @tieke before purchasing. Do you know what version of the hub you have? Are there any differences you know of?

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SumnerBoy

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#1747722 25-Mar-2017 21:34

Found a binding for openHAB v1.8 (https://github.com/octa22/org.openhab.binding.xiaomigateway) and apparently there is one for openHAB v2 as well (I am still running v1.8). Or just write your own python integration using https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mihome.

Plenty of options and so cheap - can see me spending some quality time with this stuff!

tieke

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#1747728 25-Mar-2017 22:09

SumnerBoy:

Will await your findings @tieke before purchasing. Do you know what version of the hub you have? Are there any differences you know of?

Just tried it now - disconnected the internet connection from my router and everything still worked: door and movement sensors, hub light, broadcom ir etc. Even my xiaomi yeelight ceiling light was still controlled by home assistant without the internet connection.

As far as the version goes, I think it originally came out in 2015, so I assume that all the current units would be v2 by now, although I'm not sure what that entails. (Mine was listed as "upgraded version"). Don't think there is any version differences with the sensors, and I've bought mine from a couple of different sites over the last few months and they've all worked.

There's a bit of faff involved with initial setup - I think I jumped through some xiaomi account hoops with the mihome app, and you have to set the location within the app to "Mainland China" in order to upgrade it/enable developer mode, but I only really use the app when pairing new devices, and the sensors themselves work well.

The home assistant forum post on the xiaomi gear is here and other home automation projects will have something similar.

Don't bother getting the cube remote - it sounded interesting, but is a pretty pointless interaction method.

SumnerBoy

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#1747734 25-Mar-2017 22:21

Ha - I saw that Cube thing and was trying to work out what I could do with it. I think I might get some of those switches - use them as scene switches around the place.

SumnerBoy

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#1747738 25-Mar-2017 22:27

@tieke - what sort of range do you get between the gateway and the sensors etc? Do they have to be pretty close?

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