BroadLink SP3 SPcc Contros Mini WiFi Smart Home Socket

Ok, this guy has enough reviews and videos on the Net and pretty much all of them are positive.
And these are my few lines of wisdom on the subject.

Pros:

• Good build quality, size, look, and feel.
• Relatively easy to configure and upgrade the firmware with the Android app.
• Two-way communication - you get the current state of the switch even after manual toggle.
• Fast to connect to WiFi and with good range.
• The Android app is good enough and has CloudBackup/Sync, so one can easily clone the setup on multiple devices.

Cons:

• Lack of official support for desktop platforms, more importantly - Linux.
  I have found an alternative solution to this, read more below
• The device will be alive as long as BroadLink's servers run as every proprietary protocol. 

rtl_433: simple text monitoring panel

There is this really nice rtl_433 "application using librtlsdr to decode the temperature from a wireless temperature sensor (433.92MHz)"  https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which does exactly what is says. 

I just thought that I can write a simple script that will keep showing only the latest decoded data.
As one can see in the example output, further below, some of the sensors sends the data 3 times and if you have couple of them the data starts to get a bit difficult to read. With a small awk script (tailored for my needs) I can get this simple output that contains only the interesting data and few colors to prettify it:

===================================================================================
|        Time         |               Name             |  ID  |  Temp |   %  | Bat
===================================================================================
| 2016-03-07 10:26:19 | Gym - WT450                    |   61 |   5.4 |  84% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:26:13 | Outdoor - Nexus                |   92 |   1.5 |  90% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:51 | Indoor  - WT450                |  131 |  20.1 |  27% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:45 | Outdoor - WT450                |  151 |   2.0 |  94% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:37 | Ventilation - Nexus            | 1281 |  17.8 |   0% | OK
===================================================================================

Eaton 3S 550 and Raspberry Pi

Briefly about the setup: Eaton 3S 550 powers a constantly running Raspberry Pi (RPi), wireless router, ADSL modem, cordless phone, wireless energy monitor (Eliq) and home automation device (Tellstick Net). All in all they are 10% of the UPS capacity which gives me about 30 minutes safety window before the RPi will shut down (shut down is triggered when battery is below 20%).

The Raspberry is running latest Raspbian and monitors the UPS using Network UPS Tools (NUT) which can power off the computer, send notifications etc. I have set up script to log the events and get an SMS on power failures (using Android phone and SMS Gateway).

Below is a screenshot from the NUT monitor GUI and results from a test run of the setup. I have manually started a bash script to collect the battery status by pooling every 15 seconds with "upsc eaton3s@localhost | grep battery.charge:"

Tellstick Duo revisited

For one or another reason I have replaced/upgraded my first Raspberry Pi (RPi) /256MB RAM/ with the latest RPi2 - the advantages are kind of obvious. I used to run the old telldus-core and now it was perfect time to upgrade it and rewrite my programs written in python with bash script using the new features in telldus-core-2.1.2.

I have tried before but failed with the device recognition and lost my patience to find the cause for the problem i.e. missing controller configuration - here is the solution.

There is really nice way to compile everything in a very clean way: instructions written in Swedish (perhaps here as well ). I got tempted to try the GUI suggested there but the repository was 5 years old which was clear NO to me.

Anyway, before I had python program running as a daemon to log selected device events and automate different switches + poor man's security monitoring solution. The only reason I was using python is to catch device and sensors triggered interrupts.

Universal thermostat CE UT-200

There is not much to write about it. It is an digital thermostat that one can easily use to maintain temperature below or above certain value. Conveniently enough, depending on the "on" and "off" setting you can set the thermostat in heating or cooling mode.

We have small room attached to the house that is not centrally heated and during the winter gets easily quite cold. We use it as gym, so maintaining a temperature around 5 degree seems reasonable enough (one can easily heat it better but of course it reflects on the electricity bill). I have hooked a regular 700W passive heating element that has its own digital thermostat, but that one is only regulating the temperature of the element.

I have Raspberry Pi that receives the temperature readings from outside and the room and in principle I can just use a regular remote switch that could be controlled by the computer. Except, that my philosophy is that I want to have a centralized system that controls the stuff around the house, but I want it to be also autonomous. I have the network version of the home automation module (Tellstick NET) and on couple of occasions when the internet connection was lost things could have got confused... Luckily, the local version (Tellstick Duo) is running independently. Unfortunately this one is also prone to failures, despite that it is running backed by UPS. So here is how I ended buying the thermostat.

Here are two graphs from the monitored temperature in the room (green line) and outdoors (red line), just to illustrate how well it works. The thermostat is set to switch on the heating below 4.5 and switch it off again above 5 degree Celsius.

Since it works as expected, I just need to mention the single disadvantage - it speaks German ;-)

ELIQ Energy Online: first impressions

Since we moved in a house, the electricity bill became something unpleasant that appears to worsen during the winter... The electricity company we have signed with, does not provide any detailed information about the consumption (except of a printed graph with the bill for the monthly consumption compared to the previous year) and the uncertainty to plan is a bit too sour to my inexperienced taste... Brief search on the NET brought me to the device I am using right now: ELIQ Online


Brief info about the product:
There is a wireless sensor that one can easily attach to the blinking LED on the energy meter.
The receiver needs to be connected to power and to your router to access Internet. The receiver collects the data and uploads it to a dedicated server. You need to create an account to access the collected data from your device. The provider is localized for Sweden (with interface in English and Swedish), that is suitable for the local market. The best price for the product I found at Kjell&Company.
If you provide more information for your household, you can get detailed comparison to similar households in 6 minutes and 1 day resolution interval.

Raspberry Pi and IR remote control with LIRC

I have been planing for a while to add an IR remote control to my RPi and the day came with the discovery of a IR set with remote control sold by Kjell&Company for a symbolic price.

First step first. I have added the receiver part since it does not require soldering at all. I have followed this manual to set and test LIRC on RPi with one exception - I use GPIO 18 as input from the IR detector. The set does not include any manual, so some research was necessary. The example code is for Arduino without any references to the specific hardware. Anyway, here I found the most relevant information. One can find example lircd.conf for some similar remotes but they did not work with the one in the package with label KEYES and distinct key pattern.

Home automation: second round

Some time ago I briefly mentioned here the main concepts behind the project. Nothing has changed dramatically, except that I realized that my SMSgate solution was outdated. The phone battery was seriously deteriorated and I also realized that it is not that easy to just replace the phone anymore.

Well, I had an old Android phone (HTC Wildfire) that was essentially lying unused for quite some time. There is not so much that one can do with this old phone... but it turned out it works just perfectly to send and receive SMS and much more.

If you are in the "business" of home automation and you have Android device, Tasker is a MUST HAVE! To send and receive SMS messages I use SMS Gateway (I could not find an easy way to send SMS from external device via Tasker).


Briefly: I have changed the original python code to send SMS via SMS Gateway via HTTP GET request from RPi and then I have slightly modified the example, so I can control stuff by SMS. It is very clean and simple solution.

Now, since I have web server on which I get the notifications from the SMS Gateway I can simply use the same code to handle events from Tasker! This is how I get notifications on call - piece of cake. I have added, at the end of the post, an example how to switch on/off device 2 via tdtool.

Home automation: Raspberry Pi + Tellstick Duo ++

There are many sites that has this project in many flavors... I will just add mine.

Brief summary: Tellstick Duo is connected to Rasberry Pi (running Raspbian).  I have SE K700i GSM phone connected to RPi as well. The main features are:

• control several radio controlled switches (Anslut)
• monitor temperature and humidity from my wireless weather station
• monitor for "door open event" (NEXA LMST-606)
• monitor for commands send by SMS (gammu) Update: replaced by Android SMS Gateway. Read more...
• report on selected events by sending SMS to predefined phone number (gammu)
• simple web interface to control some of the features (apache + php)
• events are logged locally in to a file and to a remote server (own twitter like)

To install telldus-core follow this guide. One can compile the GUI for RPi or use it on another computer to set the codes. I wanted to be able to repeat the original codes from the remote controls. Advanced users can use code from the examples to "learn" the codes.

Essentially, I am running a monitoring program written in python (took one of the provided examples and changed it severely). It catches signals from the remote controls and could trigger an action. In other words, I can use the remote controls to send signals to RPi. The same program monitors the GSM. It could trigger an action upon CALL or SMS. The signal from the door is logged by default but could also send an SMS - poor man's home security alarm.

I particularly like the CALL feature since you do not need to answer the call, so no cost attached. The downside is that there is only one action hooked to this event. SMS is easier but will cost you (or not - depends on the plan you have). When SMS is received from another phone (not mine) the SMS is logged and forwarded to my phone.