Raspberry Pi Home Automation Ideas...

[raspberrypiguy1]

Hello all!

I've been thinking a little recently about Raspberry Pi Home Automation, and what I could do with it!

I was just wondering if, in this sub-topic, I could get 3 (not very well known) Home Automation ideas... Anyone?!

I would really appreciate anything!

Thanks a million...

The Raspberry Pi Guy

[austinp]

Use an actuator or some other motor to control all the blinds in the house automatically based on time

Use an ultra sonic sensor near your front door to tell when you're about to leave your house and pop up a message regarding traffic for your route to work

There are all of the voice controlled options out there too. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/0 ... d-even-tv/

[raspberrypiguy1]

Use an actuator or some other motor to control all the blinds in the house automatically based on time

Use an ultra sonic sensor near your front door to tell when you're about to leave your house and pop up a message regarding traffic for your route to work

There are all of the voice controlled options out there too. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/0 ... d-even-tv/

Wow! That's quite a few good ideas! Has anyone got any more?!

Thanks

The Raspberry Pi Guy

[redhawk]

The Pi can be used as a poorman's 433.92MHz radio transmitter to operate RF mains switching equipment.
Do a search for "pihat" and look for compatible hardware.

Richard S.

[raspberrypiguy1]

That's another smashing idea! Any others anyone wants to rattle of?!

Thanks

The Raspberry Pi Guy

[Loboexe]

I have several "plans" or ideas I would like to do

In no particular order :-

Heating/Energy use
Individual room temp sensing, leading to boiler control and radio TRV's on the rads to replace a single CH thermostat / programmer. Add in data from a home weather station to predict cold spells (not sure if this would work) and or RFID key rings so if the house is unoccupied the heating is set to a cooler temp than it would be if people are in.

Hot water tank monitor, only heat the water when needed.

Electrical supply alarm if you loose power.

Electricity usage, possible remote turn on/off of appliances

Security
Daylight sensor to automatically turn on lights in the evening when nobody is home to make it look like somebody is in. Remote door bell to your smart phone - maybe even a talk to function with web cam to see who is at the door.

Shut / Open curtains or blinds

IR movement detectors for home built alarm system

Web cam to record intruders to off site with text alerts

Other

Weather station, air quality (CO2 etc) Pollen count, Out side lights activated by IR with web cam recording, Fridge temp or Freezer temp alert, Follow me music as you move around the house

[BudBennett]

I have implemented a multi-zone (multi-room) heating control system for my house. The Pi senses thermistors in 9 zones and controls the zone valves and boiler for the in-floor heating. The interface is a secure website on my local network that is accessible from any device with a browser. There are two pages - outdoor and indoor. The outdoor page shows gauges and 2 hour plots of temperature, light intensity (lux), and barometric pressure (just for giggles). The indoor page shows gauges and 2 hour plots for all of the zones and the boiler output temperature. Clicking on the plot brings up a larger plot with multiple days of data that can be zoomed for details. There is a vacation mode where you can set a date/time for your return and have the temperature reduced while you're away and automagically restored prior to your return (if you can predict that in advance). The system sends emails (including a CC: to the person watching the house) if the power is lost or there is a failure in the boiler or zone temps. My system is in a slab, so there is a long response time from when the boiler turns on and the heat increases in the room - this results in both undershoot and overshoot of the target temperature. Phase two will be to try to correct the under/overshoot with a predictive/adaptive control algorithm.

Water Well Monitor
I have a deep water well, 600 feet, that only produces 8 gal./hour into a 1700 gallon cistern. My next project will be to monitor the cistern float valve to see if it returns to full periodically. If it doesn't then the monitor will send an email with a warning to check it out. We have run out of water several times - either a lightning strike on the pump controller or a frozen float valve. It would be good to know if there is a problem several days before the cistern goes dry.

[raspberrypiguy1]

Wow that's awesome! These ideas are helping me loaddddss! Any more ?!

Thanks

The Raspberry Pi Guy

[SteveHickson]

I have some easily configurable software that uses voice recognition to run programs. I know a couple of people have used it to open garage doors and turn off lights with their voice. Once you have a program that does something, you can use my voice command software to run it without having to program anything new since it just runs commands from a config file based on what you say. It can be found here:

http://stevenhickson.blogspot.com/2013/ ... ry-pi.html
And here's a youtube demo of the first version (it sounds prettier in v2.0)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NHklmXMouY

[gfaman]

Hi,

I connect my Pi to a weather station, linked to my website: http://weather.solarcamlab.com

With Pywws SW is it not too difficult but the rendering on the website is not very attractive.... I'm looking for something better.

Also, it is configure as proxy server for connexion out of home.

Laurent

[hilljgo]

Here's and idea I've been throwing around, but I'm not too sure how I could accomplish it.

I have a cat, a crazy cat. He's nuts, and I think it would be interesting to see his daily habits. A quick idea was a tracking system, putting a chip on his collar (rfid? rf chip?) and have a receiver on the pi (probably a arduino/pi combo) that would upload a position to the web server. Maybe put his location or a diagram of his movements on a live map in a browser? What would be the best way to go about this?

Other ideas, since cats are awesome, is to maybe put a motion sensor/webcam near his food bowl or something and get a snapshot or video of him eating, maybe even upload data into a spreadsheet to track his eating patterns. I donno...

I think using the pi to interact with pets is awesome, anyone else got some cool pet/pi ideas?

[X37]

What I would like is to mod it in a way of upgrading it...

I would like to add a better CPU, RAM, HARD Drive and a Graphics card and a cooling system...

What do you think?

[rezin]

Another Idea would be to control the electricity over these http://www.amazon.de/Elro-AB440S-3C-Fun ... ksteckdose (Don't know the english word) and use voice recognition to control them
Tutorial:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 37&t=46688

[RaspLogic]

I'm doing this www.rasplogic.com

It's not ready yet, but soon it will

[Jokke]

I have work in progress/done for following:
1) RPi internet radio / controller / alarm clock / temperatures
2) Arduino more temperatures / light control / display
3) Android software to simply control these from my phone over home WLan

So RPi is the heart that connects these together, Arduino(s) connected over ethernet or some other media to do more of the io-intensive tasks. Next step would be to get that android software started so I would not need to do all the controls with curl and then start planning possibly more lights, some fan controls to even up the temperatures between floors etc.

More details in http://techblog.ilujo.net I have some pics but not online yet. There is link to short video demo from first set of lights attached.

- Jokke

[droopy]

Im working with a plant irrigation system for my (pepper) plants and light control...
Might also aff control for a fan..

[pinkythepig]

I'm doing a doorbell thing that takes a picture of whoever rung the doorbell and then sends that picture to my smartphone to let me allow/deny access.

[elhunko]

I'm doing a doorbell thing that takes a picture of whoever rung the doorbell and then sends that picture to my smartphone to let me allow/deny access.

You using any source to help you with it? Or is this something you already know how to do? I've researched various places and have been trying to figure out where to being with this particular project.

Thanks for all the other posts to this thread. I'm interested in checking out some of the youtube tutorials mentioned.

[txt3rob]

for the doorbell you would need the cam to have a long usb cable and then you would check the wiring on the door bell alarm box and then measure for a current and when a current runs over then a script will action it.

that or slap a small tablet as your door entry.

i know a company has used the zoostorm sl8's as door entry system.

[txt3rob]

the pi beat box would be a good example of how to make a start i suppose also

[txt3rob]

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
filename=$(date +"%m-%d-%y|||%H%M%S")
fswebcam -r 356x292 -d /dev/video0 $filename.jpg
./dropbox_uploader.sh upload $filename.jpg

what i've used to take snap shot and upload to dropbox

dropbox uploader is on github

[de Winter]

BudBennet,
Hey i was just wondering if you had the hardware list that would allow me to purchase a similar system? I have some friends in IT that could look after the programming aspects.


Thanks,


Chris de Winter.

[BudBennett]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the slow response - I have not checked the forum in a while. I cobbled together my current system from several sources: The ADC is a demo board of the LTC2499, a 16-channel 24-bit ADC with I2C interface. The digital I/O is a MCP23017 built on the Adafruit Pi Plate ( and the ADC demo board is mounted on top of that.) The boiler zone valves are controlled by 2 SainSmart 8-channel solid state relay modules. I used 100k NTC thermistors to sense temperature. The system has a resolution of approx. 0.01 F so the curves are exceptionally smooth.

My deep well pump monitor is described in this post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 0V#p412103

I am in the process of upgrading the system to a custom PCB that integrates all of the analog and digital I/O onto a 3"x2" double layer PCB. It's completely surface mounted components except for the terminal blocks and 2x13 header. OSH park will provide three boards for under $30.00 with about a 3 week turn around. I can't show the schematic here (it isn't readable in the 64kB forum limit) but here's a fuzzy view of the proposed PCB.

Custom I/O PCB.

tempcontrollerPCB_BW1.png (58.65 KiB) Viewed 17283 times

The new design has 3 terminal blocks for I2C bus expansion and its own 3.3V regulator. It also has the interrupt pins of the MCP3017 wired to 2 GPIO pins on the RPI to enable a quicker response to digital input transitions. The LTC2499 has an exposed pad which makes hand soldering of that component especially difficult. Send me a private message if you want more info.

Bud.

[simonmcc]

For my next project I'm planning to install an RPi based control in my garage for the garage doors. So simple things like being able to open/close the garage doors over a simple web page, and other more complicated things like automatically close the doors if it gets to (for example) midnight and they are open, and unobstructed.

I have seen other projects where it could send a text or email if they are open for a period of time

[thienson30]

Check out my home automation project. I can control up to 1000 items/devices in multiple locations through WLAN(WWW) or LAN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ59sDgKqXE