Since I discovered the Sonoff I've been thinking about embedding it inside a switch. I started looking for old power meters, timers,… I had at home but the Sonoff is a bit too long. Why didn't they design a square board? I event bought a bulky Kemo STG15 case with socket. Next I decided to design my own board. It is meant to be the “official” hardware for the ESPurna project so it's called ESPurna too....
I was not the first to arrive at the party but since I discovered the ESP8266 I've been enjoying it. Then I stumbled upon the Sonoff and dude was I amazed. They are cheap and so very hackable you cannot help buying them, tear them open and customize them. Sure they are not CE or UL compliant, yet. My previous post about adding a custom RF module to a Sonoff HT got some visibility as it was published at hackaday....
[Update 2013-03-01] I have added more documentation on the codes these remotes use in a different post. I'm starting to move towards not only gathering information but also acting. My first project in this subject will be controlling some lights and the house heaters. So last week I visited the urban market of “Els Encants” in Barcelona and bought some very cheap wireless outlets. Two different remotes I bought two sets of three wall plugs, each set with it's own remote....
Now that I have started to monitor some magnitudes at home, like power consumption or the front door opening, I have to do something with this information. The sensor information can be useful for two purposes, mainly: analysing it to know more about your environment or your life-style patterns (like when and how you spend the money you spend on energy) taking real-time actions based on events from your sensors (open a light when you pass by a dark corridor at night, receive a notification when someone enters your house,…) To analyse the information you will first have to store it in some way you could retrieve it later, graph it, summarize it, perform different time range roll ups or moving averages or detect time patterns,… whatever....
Naming stuff is one of the core decisions one has to take while designing an architecture. It might not look as important as utilising the right pattern in the right place or defining your database model but my experience says that a good naming convention helps identifying design flaws. In a previous post I introduced the network I'm building for my home monitoring system. As I said it will be based on MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol....
