Yesterday evening I finally put together all the components that I have been gathering and trying and prototyping (loads of reading, trying, reading again).

So it’s born, Tempie1. A first version (I’m sure that I will find ways to improve it) of a battery powered wireless temperature sensor. For now it sends back the temperature and a voltage reading of the Xbee (so I can see when I need to replace batteries) when I send a request for a reading. If this is really the way to go in my home automation system (to be developed) I don’t know yet.

Next step, prototyping HumiTee1 (battery powered wireless humidity and temperature sensor).

This morning I installed the JpGraph lib for PHP to create some nice graphs of the readings. Yesterday I managed to create a script which records the readings of the 3 temperature sensors in a database. I first had an interval of 5 minutes but realized that hourly readings should be enough.

[my home-server is a bit slow at the moment so took this graph offline]

The first step in my home automation project is logging the temperature on different places in my appartment. The goal is to have small wireless battery powered temperature sensors in every room. These sensors send their data to a base receiver where the data is processed in stored in a database.

I bought some DS18B20 digital temperature sensors and connected them to my arduino board for a test/prototype setup. At the moment I have three of these sensors on the same board, which ofcourse doesn’t make that much sense. But it’s just to play around a bit. The board is still on USB, connected to my Ubuntu server. Every hour, the arduino sends the readings from the sensors to the server.

I now write the readings from the sensors to a log file, but this weekend I want to write the data to a MySQL database.

ai ai ai (as they sometimes say here in swiss german), last post was in June 2010. I think I already opened a lot of posts here with ‘time for an update’. It’s pretty difficult to come up with something interesting every time. But since I have a new hobby project, I think I can update this blog on a more regular basis.

So what’s new? Well, I already had the idea for a long time that when I have a house/appartment it should be stuffed technological gadgets that make the house/appartment into a smart home. Home automation is not so futuristic anymore as it was when I visited the house of the future in the early ninetees. Now 20 years laters, I have my own appartment (well, rental) and I’m very interested in developing my own home automation system.

I’m ofcourse not the only one that has this idea. You can find home automation hobby projects all over te world. There are also a number of commercial systems available. However, I don’t want an off the shelf system, but play around with sensors, microcontrollers and write my own interface.

Again, long time no post..

Just very busy busy with work and thesis. But still going ok here. And to make it up, a nice purple flower from the Rocoto Red. I grow this plant for the first year and it’s a very beautiful plant. The fruit from this plant is also supposed to be very tasty so.. hopfully this flower will become a juicy chilli

Last week I was browsing through my picture book which I made from my trip to Chile in 2007 and realized that I didn’t put the pictures online yet.

So, here they are (click on them to go to the album page):

Sunday went for a nice hike. Here some pano’s

I went to another meeting of the Baselphotoclub. This time we took the train to Dornach to have a look at the very impressive Goetheanum. There were some new/other people and some familiar faces, it stayed dry, we had to run for the train back and had a (or two) beer when we were back in Basel so I think a nice evening.