Now that is interesting, thanks.Make rtl433 your best friend
First home lab advice
- Thread starter techfan32
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That all sounds very interesting, I’m keen to learn more about this approach. I haven’t tried any of these so far (ESP, rtl433, esphome, Wemos, Zigbee, or MQTT). Are they quite intuitive or a bit of a learning curve needed? Thanks for giving the lingo so I can search these further.
My go to approach is to link a raspberry pi with an Arduino plus sensors for data logging and sharing. But this can be a bit overkill and over complicated. I also finding myself spending too much time on specifics like data formatting, robustness to failure modes, etc. I would love to find an ecosystem that has good libraries/frameworks that handle that for me to reduce time spent on these fundamentals.
Your approach seems more elegant and less barrier to entry for adding new sensors. I will try and learn this more! Overall, are you quite happy with this approach/ecosystem? Are there things that it doesn’t quite do for you that other methods might handle better?
My go to approach is to link a raspberry pi with an Arduino plus sensors for data logging and sharing. But this can be a bit overkill and over complicated. I also finding myself spending too much time on specifics like data formatting, robustness to failure modes, etc. I would love to find an ecosystem that has good libraries/frameworks that handle that for me to reduce time spent on these fundamentals.
Your approach seems more elegant and less barrier to entry for adding new sensors. I will try and learn this more! Overall, are you quite happy with this approach/ecosystem? Are there things that it doesn’t quite do for you that other methods might handle better?
I'm glad I managed encourage you to start experimenting. Building monitoring system is a lot of fun, but can also be frustrating, so don't get discouraged. And it takes time, so be patient. I started from building sensors "for fun" without having much practical use for them, but it helped me a lot to understand the technology. One or two sensors by themselves are not very useful, but once you have more sensors around the house, it becomes much more interesting. A completely unexpected discovery I made after placing several pm2.5 sensors around the house, was seeing how the air circulates (e.g. how the very fine smoke from frying in the kitchen expands through the house), and how effective is forcing air circulation by turning on the blower in the AC system in cleaning the air.
The sensors need to be backed by software. The easiest route is to set up some kind of home automation system which uses data from them. I use Home Assistant, but I'm sure other systems also can be configured to use data reported via mqtt.
For collection and logging I wrote my own database-independent processing system, but you should be able to achieve similar results with Telegram in InfluxDB. I'm still working on my system, but I'm getting close to the point where it will be good enough to share it with the world.
Am I happy with my ecosystem? In general yes. It does what I want it to do, and I have fun building it.
To help you with googling, here is a bit of explanation of all the lingo:
MQTT - communication protocol commonly used for exchange data between IoT devices. It relies on one central node (broker) which receives data from publishers, and sends it to subscribers (pub/sub mechanism)
RTL433 - software package which can receive and decode messages sent by simple sensors and other devices using 433MHz radio band (most of wireless weather station sensors, but also wireless switches, alarms, TPMS sensors, etc)
ESP8266 - Cheap microcontroller with WiFi capabilities. Can be programmed like any other arduino-compatible device.
Wemos - Chinese company, which developed an ecosystem of modules, absed on ESP chips, similar to Arduino (HOME — WEMOS documentation). Aliexptes is flooded with them, and they are cheap enough to buy by dozens, just to have one handy if you want to quickly implement a crazy idea.
ESPHome - software package for simple IoT sensors and devices. Initially develped for ESP chips, but also works with other microcontrollers. Most simple use cases can be handled without writing a single line of code. Integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant.
The sensors need to be backed by software. The easiest route is to set up some kind of home automation system which uses data from them. I use Home Assistant, but I'm sure other systems also can be configured to use data reported via mqtt.
For collection and logging I wrote my own database-independent processing system, but you should be able to achieve similar results with Telegram in InfluxDB. I'm still working on my system, but I'm getting close to the point where it will be good enough to share it with the world.
Am I happy with my ecosystem? In general yes. It does what I want it to do, and I have fun building it.
To help you with googling, here is a bit of explanation of all the lingo:
MQTT - communication protocol commonly used for exchange data between IoT devices. It relies on one central node (broker) which receives data from publishers, and sends it to subscribers (pub/sub mechanism)
RTL433 - software package which can receive and decode messages sent by simple sensors and other devices using 433MHz radio band (most of wireless weather station sensors, but also wireless switches, alarms, TPMS sensors, etc)
ESP8266 - Cheap microcontroller with WiFi capabilities. Can be programmed like any other arduino-compatible device.
Wemos - Chinese company, which developed an ecosystem of modules, absed on ESP chips, similar to Arduino (HOME — WEMOS documentation). Aliexptes is flooded with them, and they are cheap enough to buy by dozens, just to have one handy if you want to quickly implement a crazy idea.
ESPHome - software package for simple IoT sensors and devices. Initially develped for ESP chips, but also works with other microcontrollers. Most simple use cases can be handled without writing a single line of code. Integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant.