home_automation
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I have plants in my office - the problem is that my days vary wildly and sometimes I forget or don't have time to water the plants. I looked for an automatic house plant watering system and they were very expensive ($49-$100) and I couldn't be sure of the quality. I was walking in Wal*Mart one evening and went past the pet asile. I picked up some inexpensive aquarium supplies with the intent of putting together my plant watering system. I also went to the hardware asile and picked up a 24 hour light timer.
Cheap and Easy Automatic House Plant Watering System
Hacking the ASUS router for the Tweet-a-Watt « adafruit industr
Using mightyohm’s tutorial to hack the ASUS router for use with the Tweet-a-watt – you don’t need a computer to report your power usage, just a hacked up Wi-Fi router ( m4v ). Related: The Tweet-a-Watt kit is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data.
What is 1-Wire 1-Wire bus is a communication system developed by Dallas Semiconductor. It is quite similar to I2C, except for the data rate, which is lower, the costs, which are very low, and the range, which is higher. The 1-Wire protocol allows the communication among several devices produced by Dallas Semiconductors/Maxim, such as:
OWFS: a Linux application targeted for 1-Wire | Your Electronics
Monitor Household AC Power usage using Clamp Meters - Hacked Gad
This Household AC Power Monitor idea is similar to what I have wanted to do for years. Jason Winters has taken two clamp meters and connected them to both phases of his house electrical panel. This allows him to monitor the entire electrical usage of his house. He is collecting data and creating a spreadsheet to monitor usage over time. What I was thinking of doing was to install one coil per breaker circuit and have a display that simply cycles through the individual circuits, show a sum of the circuit usage and also a RGB LED to indicate amount of usage at a glance.
This project can take many different forms but here are the parts which I used for mine. -3 wall outlet sockets (about a buck each) -1 normal power strip ($10) - 6 3A 120VAC relays ( at DigiKey here $1.8 each) NOTE: 3A at 120VAC is 360 Watts per socket. If you are interested in remotely controlling a microwave or hair-dryer think about investing a few extra bucks in bigger relays. - 1 SIS-7C chip from the nice people at Simerec ($19.95) - 1 IR receiver from Simerec . ($2.99) - 1 universal remote. I used this one (2$) - Solid 18AWG hookup wire. - Perf-board - Any kind of small AWG signal wire. - 12 ft of insulated wrapping wire. - Some sort of housing big enough to fit all your stuff. I used a generic Radio Shack one. - 1 120VAC to DC 5-6 volt converter that outputs at least 400mA.
Remote Control Power Strip
Once upon a time, “getting connected” meant setting your computer desk up by a telephone port, whipping out a massive lugger of a dial-up modem and blocking your ears as the modem screeched and beeped its way towards connectivity. That cliched sound, still sometimes heard in commercials about the Internet that were evidently designed by someone who hasn’t used it since 1995, was the bane of teenagers of the era who tried every trick in the book to muffle that sound at midnight, trying to get online when they were meant to be in bed. Today, the situation has changed entirely.
6 Essential Items to Get Any Device Connected to Your Home Netwo
How to: DIY Home Automation Tutorial
Don’t know about you, but physically getting up and turning on my lights is far too much work. Home automation is surprisingly simple actually and we’ve compiled plenty of resources for you to create your own home of the future. How to DIY Automation Projects:
This is the heart of the beast - the actual hardware to control the outlet. My version is in a nice little case that I scrounged from my father's junk pile... I've got a kitty cat, and I think 120V 50AMP adds up to just a little over 9 cat lifes, so it's better safe than sorry with this thing.
Computer Controlled Power Switch
$30 Historical Temperature Sensor System using PC,1-wire, Perl,
I wanted a cost effective way to record temperatures in different areas (computer rooms specifically) and present the data using graphs. Currently the temperatures are updated every 5 minutes, and can be accessed via a web page, but this could easily be modified to perform alerts based on thresholds. For the initial system, I decided to monitor temperatures throughout my home (basement, 1st floor, Attic, and outside) I chose to use windows, as most of my clients have a windows system readily available. The system is based on 1-wire devices, these things are amazing, and small. Basically using 2 wires, from the serial port adaptor (USB also avail) they receive power, and will acknowledge temperature requests based on their unique serial number being sent down the 1-wire bus.{{{ ''''''' }}}
