Category Archive

For over a year now the living room node and La Crosse Gateway has been sitting atop a plastic bin next to my patio slider in a mess of wires.  This is when you know you have too many projects lying around the house.  So this summer I decided to design a PCB with a nodeMCU that will replace both projects and mount atop of a power brick. I went with the nodeMCU since there is power nearby, ease of connecting directly to the MQTT broker, and I can broadcast more often without the power limitations of a battery. This project frees up two RFM12B boards so that they can be used for the other window and the front door. Living room …

It’s been a few months since I have worked on openHAB but that is mostly due to focusing on FriedCircuits, Hackaday Prize and the Maker Faire. Not a dull moment around here! I finally sat down while watching some tube (or rather crystals) to start work on the JeeNode to MQTT gateway. Up to this point if you have read my other posts I have still relied on DomotiGA to get the JeeNode data into openHAB. This is because DomotiGA has support for JeeNodes. I noticed the sensor nodes weren’t checking in again which usually is because DomotiGA is not running, this time I think it just needed a restart plus one node actually needs batteries. This prompted me to …

A few of the sensor nodes are battery powered so it is important to know if they have stopped transmitting. My previous system (which is still feeding openHAB) tracks last seen time stamp. In openHAB you have to set an item and a rule to handle that. This is one of the items at the bottom of this post that is required to remove my reliance on DomotiGa. All this requires is one item to store the time stamp and a rule to update it whenever the sensor item receives a change. The only catch in my case is if the new value is the same as the current, it seems it is not triggered as an update. I am …

Now that everything is humming along we can make some fancy rules. This includes creating a flexible timer and auto mode based on room temperature. I went through a lot of iterations but ended up with some nice rules that work well. I will post the current version here but any updates will be maintained on Github. Timer Items Number tempFire_TimerValue “Fireplace Timer [%d min(s)]” (gHeating)Switch tempFire_TimerSwitch “Start Timer” (gHeating)DateTime tempFire_TimerStart “Timer stated at [%1$tr]” (gHeating)Number tempFire_TimerElapsed “Time elapsed [%d min(s)]” (gHeating)Number tempFire_TimerLeft “Time remaining [%d min(s)]” (gHeating) Sitemap Setpoint item=tempFire_TimerValue minValue=5 maxValue=60 step=5 Switch item=tempFire_TimerSwitch Text item=tempFire_TimerStart visibility=[tempFire_TimerSwitch==ON] Text item=tempFire_TimerElapsed visibility=[tempFire_TimerSwitch==ON] Text item=tempFire_TimerLeft visibility=[tempFire_TimerSwitch==ON] Rules rule “Fireplace Timer”when Item tempFire_TimerSwitch changed from OFF to ONthen val fireMin = (tempFire_TimerValue.state …