A few weeks ago a user came with a request to add support in ESPurna to a power meter that had been hacked by Karl Hagström. It is a very cheap chinese power meter with plenty of room on the inside, enough to house an ESP8266 module and a DC/DC power supply and the main IC protocol had been reverse engeneered. There even was a repository by the Harringay Maker Space with sample code for an arduino compatible platform....
If you have read me, you might know I have a firmware for ESP8266-based smart switches called ESPurna. The firmware integrates with Alexa, Domoticz, Home Assistant and about any other service that supports MQTT or HTTP REST APIs. It supports a variety of devices, including almost the whole Sonoff family by Itead Studio, but also some other commercially available boards and light bulbs, and open source hardware projects as well....
Some 3 years ago I started building my own wireless sensor network at home. The technology I used at the moment has proven to be the right choice, mostly because it is flexible and modular. MQTT is the keystone of the network. The publisher-subscriber pattern gives the flexibility to work on small, replaceable, simple components that can be attached or detached from the network at any moment. Over this time is has gone through some changes, like switching from a series of python daemons to Node-RED to manage persistence, notifications and reporting to several “cloud” services....
