Home Monitor

[skiman]

We have a Ring camera and security system. I am very pleased with it for home monitoring. One sensor is a combo water/temperature. Unfortunately it only warns at a temperature of 40 something. No continuous readout. Great though if something goes wrong under the sink. Best part is monitoring service is $100 bucks a year for everything. I have multiple cameras, door,
motion, smoke, temperature, water. About a grand invested. Takes a lot of worry out of being gone especially in winter.

[padlin]

Originally Posted by cpaharley2008

Which one Bob, I have a Bushnell...one in Escape, one at home

This one https://www.lacrossetechnology.com/c...eather-station

La Cross says Out Of Stock, I ordered it from Costco, hopefully I'll get it. Just want WiFi and alarm functions.

[Travelinstead]

I think it depends where you live, we have gone with the Telus smart home system. Security, thermostats, lights, water detector and shut off, plugs, and remote control from anywhere in the world. I recently adjusted the heat from Vietnam.

[cpaharley2008]

When I saw the title Home Monitor I envisioned the tv commercials for "I have fallen and can not get up" monitors...

[alanmalk]

Originally Posted by jxoco

I think it also has IFTT programming available.
" If This Than do That "

If you are retired with too much time on your hands you can go off the deep end like me and build your own monitor. This one monitors air temperature and power to a friend's mountain cabin. Easy enough to add sound, intrusion alert, water levels, etc. And it uses WiFi to notify IFTTT which in turn can send you email, phone calls, etc if something is out of sorts plus you can point your browser at the "cloud" and get a snapshot (see photo) any time you want. Just a few hundred man hours and a wife who thinks you are nuts, and all this can be yours.

--
Alan

[jxoco]

Originally Posted by alanmalk

If you are retired with too much time on your hands you can go off the deep end like me and build your own monitor. This one monitors air temperature and power to a friend's mountain cabin. Easy enough to add sound, intrusion alert, water levels, etc. And it uses WiFi to notify IFTTT which in turn can send you email, phone calls, etc if something is out of sorts plus you can point your browser at the "cloud" and get a snapshot (see photo) any time you want. Just a few hundred man hours and a wife who thinks you are nuts, and all this can be yours.

--
Alan

Now we’re talking.
Is that a raspberry pi

[gbaglo]

I found a WEMO WiFi Smart Plug in my Xmas stocking.
Any ideas what to use it for? I guess I could use it to turn on a table lamp at home when I'm in Osooyoos, but there must be better ideas.

[jxoco]

Originally Posted by gbaglo

I found a WEMO WiFi Smart Plug in my Xmas stocking.
Any ideas what to use it for? I guess I could use it to turn on a table lamp at home when I'm in Osooyoos, but there must be better ideas.

I have a couple of wemos.
One turns on a desktop compter. Then i can turn it on with the wemo, wait a few minutes for it to be running and then remote into it with teamviewer and turn it off when I’m finished.
The other resets a camera that sometimes locks up. Meaning that it’s showing a daytime picture at night.
You can turn on a space heater before you get home.
And the old faithful use is to turn on a coffee maker from bed.
If you have Alexa or google hub it can turn it off and on for you, xmas trees and hard to reach lamps.
We have some other ones that we just tell alexa to turn on the living room and a bunch of lights come on.

[alanmalk]

Originally Posted by jxoco

Now we’re talking.
Is that a raspberry pi

Much smaller (and cheaper, of course) than raspberry pi.
Particle Photon. Comes with free cloud access. And IFTTT is also free. Did I mention cheap? Seems to be my underlying principal.

[padlin]

Originally Posted by gbaglo

I found a WEMO WiFi Smart Plug in my Xmas stocking.
Any ideas what to use it for? I guess I could use it to turn on a table lamp at home when I'm in Osooyoos, but there must be better ideas.

It could be handy for a few things when I'm home. Turning on/off heat in the shed or the trailer without me needing to go out and do it. But for traveling all I can think of is the lights, which I could do with the timers I already own if I felt a need.

[yardsale]

Originally Posted by huskersteffy

I'm almost ready to pull the trigger on a Samsung Smart Things hub, ecobee Tstat and a couple of compatible water detectors.

https://www.smartthings.com/

We have gone with a MarCell unit. We did so as due diligence revealed that several other brands do not automatically reset after a power loss, not a helpful feature if you are 1000 miles away. We tested our unit and it reset fine.

https://www.meetmarcell.com/marcell-...RoCvu4QAvD_BwE

[jxoco]

Installed an ecobee yesterday at our cabin, and removed it and will be returning it.
I loved the look and the alerts and everything but, I could not set the ‘Away’ temperature below 7C.
The honeywell wifi thermostat can be set down to 4.5C
That 2.5 degrees of heat when we are not at the cabin for weeks can really add up in propane heating costs.
Sorry to have to return it.
I wrote them quite a long letter and I hope they tell me it is something they could fix in a firmware upgrade.
We’ll see.

[gbaglo]

I just asked my TV cable provider how I can stop the screen saver from starting up. I like to leave all the lights in the living room off, and the TV on so there is a flickering light seen through a window at the front of the house. Now, I come home after being away and the screen saver has effectively shut down my "security system".

Apparently, I can't do anything. Shaw cable has control of my TV.

[jxoco]

Originally Posted by alanmalk

Much smaller (and cheaper, of course) than raspberry pi.
Particle Photon. Comes with free cloud access. And IFTTT is also free. Did I mention cheap? Seems to be my underlying principal.

I just ordered one.
Of course it’s $50cdn.
And it will take a month to get here.
Any code to share or stuff I should look at.

Your example is exactly what I need for our cabin.
Power outages are frequent.
And sometimes an emergency visit is required to fire up the gas generator and get the propane furnace putting some heat into it.

I have a small wireless that takes a sim card and phone service usually works for a half hour past a power failure because the tower has battery backup.

A raspberry pi would use more power than the proton.
The battery backup that I have only has a 7ah battery.

[jxoco]

Originally Posted by gbaglo

I just asked my TV cable provider how I can stop the screen saver from starting up. I like to leave all the lights in the living room off, and the TV on so there is a flickering light seen through a window at the front of the house. Now, I come home after being away and the screen saver has effectively shut down my "security system".

Apparently, I can't do anything. Shaw cable has control of my TV.

Glen where you are you should be able to tune in a station thru the air, off mount seymour.
Just cheap rabbit ears should work.
I can get a couple of stations here in Surrey.
You could leave it on that channel.

[alanmalk]

Originally Posted by jxoco

I just ordered one.
Of course it’s $50cdn.
And it will take a month to get here.
Any code to share or stuff I should look at.

Your example is exactly what I need for our cabin.
Power outages are frequent.
And sometimes an emergency visit is required to fire up the gas generator and get the propane furnace putting some heat into it.

I have a small wireless that takes a sim card and phone service usually works for a half hour past a power failure because the tower has battery backup.

A raspberry pi would use more power than the proton.
The battery backup that I have only has a 7ah battery.

A raspberry pi is a true computer with 4 cores, operating system (linux), browser, email, various other applications, ram, usb, video, etc, etc. Therefor it consumes a considerable amount of power, and would be overkill for a home monitor. Whereas the Particle processors (Proton and many others) are "just" processors, running one piece of code, no operating system or any of the above goodies. But lots of available connections for sensors and usually a communication chip for WiFi or Cellular. And correspondingly low power requirements.

I would recommend a good battery backup for your phone and wifi system, so you can reliably receive the alerts when they happen.

For cheaper parts and faster service you might consider buying little parts like this on Ebay.

As far as sharing code & schematics: Send me a PM and I will be happy to send along anything I can find. I should have the Photon code and the browser HTML - somewhere... And a small possibility that I can find the wiring diagram, although real pieces of paper tend to get lost in the clutter.

--
Alan

[gbaglo]

Originally Posted by jxoco

Glen where you are you should be able to tune in a station thru the air, off mount seymour.
Just cheap rabbit ears should work.
I can get a couple of stations here in Surrey.
You could leave it on that channel.

Thanks. Good idea.

[John in Santa Cruz]

ALL that consumer grade Internet of Things (IoT) stuff is full of security flaws and spyware. Another security camera 'startup' apparently just discovered that their entire 2.5 million customer base had all their personal info hanging out on the internet for a month for anyone to scrape.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/iot-ve...s-server-leak/

btw, raspberry pi high power? if 10 watts is 'high' power, I suppose. the pi3b that runs my home weather station is more like 5-6 watts typical, 10-12 watts *max*. 10 watts translates to 7kWH/month if its on 24/7, which is maybe $1-2/month on your electric bill.

[alanmalk]

John is correct. There is likely no security in my cabin temperature monitor, so it is safe to assume that Russian spies know the temperature in my house, plus the battery voltage of the backup power supply. Could be worse - but there are no speakers or cameras hooked up.

Yes, in my opinion, a raspberry pi is a power hog. The official power supply for the new pi-4 supplies 15.3 watts, and active cooling is recommended for the CPU. For battery power projects I prefer to use processors like a naked ATMEGA328P that with the right programming can run on milliwatts. Saves on AA batteries. (Perhaps I mentioned I carry the tightwad gene?)
--
Alan


If interested in ultra low power 328P programming: http://www.gammon.com.au/power


If interested in ultra low power switching: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15353

[John in Santa Cruz]

the fear isn't the IoT device itself being hacked, but rather that it could provide a stepping stone into your network and be used to hack your other systems, for instance installing ransomware that encrypts your files, then demands money to unlock, or gets into your ecommerce accounts (amazon, etc) and/or accesses your banking and credit cards.