Tag "xbee"

Moving from the ESP8266 world I've been diving lately I still love the simplicity of battery powered Moteino nodes. You might know I'm migrating my XBee-based sensor network at home to an RFM69 one. So long I have changed my door monitor and my weather station. They are sensing and reporting to my RFM69GW, an ESP8266 bridge board using a custom firmware. Time to go for the power monitor. A long time ago (actually 2 years but it really feels like a century ago) I was living in a big city and we had one of those fancy “smart meters” with a LED pulsing 4000 times every kWh....

A few weeks ago I wrote about my new door monitor. It was the first step towards migrating my XBee based wireless sensors network to RFM69 radios using Moteino platform by LowPowerLab. I was truly impressed by the low power consumption so I committed myself to keep on working with them. Coincidentally Felix Russo, the guy behind LowPowerLab, released the new version of it's Weather Shield for Moteino. So it was time to update (or completely revamp) my trusty Arduino FIO based weather station… and last week I received a parcel from LowPowerLab with a pair of shields to play with: the new WeatherShield R2 and the PowerShield R3....

Some days ago I posted about the RFM69 to MQTT gateway based on the ESP8266 I am working on. Over these days I've been fine tuning the gateway at the same time I was migrating one of my home sensors to Moteino: the Door Monitor. The previous version was based on an XBee radio and has been on duty for almost 3 years and a half. Real life battery time has been around 3 months for a CR2032 coin cell, which is not bad at all, but still…...

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....

In my last post about counting events with Arduino and PCF8583 I talked about this “yet another weather station” project I was working on last summer. The station was deployed in the garden of a cute apartment we rented in an old “masia” near Olot, 100 km north of Barcelona. It is in the mountainside, surrounded by woods and 10 minutes walking from the near town. It has a beautiful garden with plenty of space....

UPDATE: check my post about my new Moteino based door monitor. In the past I've been monitoring my home door with an IP camera and the motion software in my server. Whenever something was moving in the camera range the server saves a little footage, takes a snapshot and calls a couple of scripts I use to send notifications via NMA and email. The problem with this set up was that it had lots of false positives....

This is going to be the last post for the smart meter pulse counter setup series. I want to wrap up several things like the final hardware, the code and the data visualization. Final hardware This is what the pulse counter sensor looks like, almost. The final version that's already “in production” has a switch to hard-reset the radio from outside the enclosure. Nothing special otherwise. Everything goes in a socket so I could reuse the components, the photocell probe connects to the 3....

So far I've posted about hardware and theoretical stuff like network architecture or naming conventions. I think it's time to move to the software side. The core of the sensor network I'm deploying at home is the Mosquitto broker that implements MQTT protocol. It manages the messaging queue, listening to messages posted by publishers and notifying the subscribers. I've been working in parallel to have at least some pieces in place to get and store information from the pulse counter sensor....

This week I have had some spare time - well, I should say I've borrowed some time from my sleep - to work on the smart-meter pulse counter setup. In my last post about this I analized the signal from my photocell sensor. My conclusion was that the signal was clean and neat, even before throwing in a schmitt trigger to make it more “digital”. I have found out that it is also very dependent on the environmental light so I good isolation is a must for the sensor....