Google Home

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This post was from a November draft. At last it has arrived – the Google Home! I have been anxiously awaiting this since I pre-ordered it in mid-October. In my opinion, Google Home is the missing piece to anyone’s home automation setup. Primarily it’s the voice control which has been the hardest to implement. In the past I have tried with a Kinect to control my smart outlets. This was before the openHAB days. While OpenHAB does have voice built-in, you have to write your own rules. Creating rules that handle natural speech is a bit tough. With Google Home you can leverage Google AI for that. Google Home at launch is a bit limited but it supports just enough …

IKEA Motion Lamp Hack Update

wpsuperadmin hack, HomeAutomation, jeenode, leds, openhab 2 Comments

Back at it again, I decided to add a few more features before I deem this project complete and ready to be put into service. In case your are wondering, this is based on my previous work on the IKEA Motion LED Lamp Hack. This time around I just wanted to make a few hardware changes that will let me have full control of the light. IKEA Motion Lamp Resistor Modification Instead of just reading the trigger voltage I decided to also inject my own signal. This way I can control if/when the lamp is on. The easiest place to intercept the signal is to move the resistor rather than cutting a trace. I rotated the resistor 90 degrees and …

IKEA Motion Lamp Hack

wpsuperadmin hack, HomeAutomation, jeenode, leds, openhab 4 Comments

Last year while visiting a friend for the Portland Mini Maker Fair I became the owner of an IKEA STÖTTA, a battery powered, motion activated, LED lamp. I knew it was ripe for hacking. After arriving home, it sat on my desk waiting to be disassembled to reveal its secrets. I figured the only way to get it off my desk was to get around to tearing it apart and seeing what I could do with it. Over the weekend I spent more time trying to decide which direction to take since there are plenty of features I could add. At least I can get something going now and add to it later. Who ever said a project had to …

Living Room Node Upgrade

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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 …

nodeLED

wpsuperadmin leds, openhab Leave a Comment

As a hacker, I know all too well how much workbench space is vital. Alongside my three monitors, I have an extended desk that houses my soldering irons, compartment shelving, and countless projects, among other tools and devices. One constant that seems to get in my way is an old desk lamp. That’s where this project came to light, ha! I decided to design my own lamp using an analog RGBW LED strip. This board I designed will give you the tools to design your own WiFi controlled light source. The boards’ controller is run by the NodeMCU which is connected to an N-Channel MOSFET for each color of the RGBW LED strip. Trimpot for brightness and two user buttons …

JeeNode to MQTT Gateway

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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 …

openHAB Last Sensor Update

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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 …

openHAB Proximity Update

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Just a quick update to the proximity tracking. The original post was just using Bluetooth which tends to not be completely reliable. So we need a backup such as WiFi. OpenHAB has a binding that can check for network devices. Between this and the device scan script for BT, we are set. Just need to add an item for each device you want to track on the network. This can be used to see if a laptop is on or even check to make sure a sensor or something it alive. Install the NetworkHealth binding – sudo apt-get install openhab-addon-binding-networkhealth There isn’t much in openhab.cfg to figure. I just setup the cache period to 60. Just restart openHAB if you make a …

openHAB and Fireplace Rules Part 5

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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 …

openHAB the Fireplace and Rules Part 4

wpsuperadmin fireplace, HomeAutomation, openhab Leave a Comment

If you haven’t read part 1, part 2, and part 3. Start there and I will wait for you here. Welcome back! Now we get to do all of the fun stuff now that we have software control of the fireplace. We can have some real fun adding features. The original remote does have a set point and scheduling options but we never used that and of course you couldn’t trigger remotely or based on other triggers. The features I had in mind are listed below. On/Off Keep original remote functionality Timer Temperature set point Remote turn on/auto when temp is under a certain value and we are coming home This would be instead of setting up scheduling Part of …