Monitoring Home

Introduction

The requirements for my monitoring projects are simple:

• Want to be mostly cabling free.

One of the things than makes a good monitoring system at home is don’t having to make new cabling all around the house each time you put a new sensor or want to check a new temperature room.

• Want to use open-source products.

There are several reasons for that. Despite what most people think that we use open-source because is free (like free beer ;-)) in my case is not true. The fact of using open-source products is because the support, the driver availability, the modifications to adapt the product, etc. etc. Several times I did donations to products so at the end, has never be free as a free beer.

Requirements

• Cheap sensors for temperature, humidity, electrical power consumption, digital status, barometric pressure,
• Long distances > 20 meters
• Cheap controllers.
• Easy deployment
• Mobile, distance and independent data display
• Database for making complex requests if needed

Hardware

• Sensors: DS18B20 with isolation for the heating system, normal one for standard temperatures, DHT21 for temperature and hygrometers, counters and opto-couplers  for electrical consumption, BMP085 Barometric Pressure,
• Arduino Models: Uno, Mega, Mini Pro, Yún
• Raspberry Pi: Version 2, 512 Model
• Servers: Mac mini Server, Standard Desktop PC, HP Proliant.
• Electronics: 433 Mhz radio transmitters, relays, resistors, diodes, etc.
• Screens and displays: TV, Standard screens, 1.8" TFT LCD Displays, Car Cameras

Software

• ARM Compilers for Arduino, Raspberry Pi.
• Raspbian
• Debian with LAMP
• Mac OS X with LAMP
• MySQL, SQLite, RRDtools Databases

In the next posts I’ll explain all the projects.