(full disclosure: I am to producer of this device, so if you feel this post is not appropriate here, please remove it)
I would like to bring to your attention a CO2 Monitor that i have been developing in over the past year. My initial idea to have a cheap, nice and WiFi connected CO2 Monitor (My Kickstarter), was taken over by the community of Domotica and HomeSeer, and they asked me to develop a new variant with high precision and wifi connectivity. As a result - i have created this device v.Things - CO2 Monitor for HA.
Currently it can connect to OpenHAB via the HTTP or MQTT Bindings, but i would be happy to create a dedicated binding to simplify the integration if there is interest.
If you are interested in buying it - am offering promotion code for community members VTHINGS_5 for 5$ discount. (valid also for the other products in the shop)
Today i’ve launched a new Crowdfunding campaign:
The trouble with most conventional CO2 Sensors is that they need to see fresh air each few days, so that they do internal calibration.
This makes them unsuitable for usage in Grow Rooms and any other application where you cannot ventilate too much.
Even in a house that is occupied the whole day - this could be tricky during cold months.
Like the other sensors i am selling here: http://shop.vair-monitor.com/
This one can be configured to any custom server over HTTP or MQTT protocols and is powered via Micro USB cable
In the past months i’ve done quite a few enhancements to the CO2 Monitor. Now it can monitor Dust, Temperature, Humidity and Pressure. As well as it is possible to monitor ONLY Temperature or Light. All this comes with native support for OpenHAB (and many other Home automation systems) via MQTT integration (still no dedicated Binding, but eventually this will come as well soon.
Thank you for sharing your product here. Through this I found it and today it arrived and I received it!
I am now looking for how to connect it to openHAB. If you could provide some instructions, that would be very kind as I just switched from Domoticz to openHAB a couple of days ago and am a total beginner with openHAB AND your device.
I would like to use the RFXtrx433E USB device to connect. Could you provide a short setup guide for beginners, please? I found an option to enable RF, but which IDs do I have to set?
Great job! The Wifi-based installation worked like a charm. Only the violet light is a little hard to see during daylight, so I didn’t notice it at first and thought the device wasn’t working. Perhaps you can make it shine a little brighter.
Hi @bernd_d - there is no battery available, but what I am considering is to buy one of these battery packs for mobile phones (cost about €20 on Amazon) and attach it via USB to the sensor. Yes - it’s not a small solution, but an option.
I also figured out how to connect via Mosquito and got everything working with that.
However, I have not yet managed to get it work via RFX, but that might be to a current bug in openHAB2 (which also leads to exceptions in the logs when discovering RFX devices).
for RFX, basically it uses RFXMeter protocol. The protocol itself allows to send some id, so that you can map it to something at the receiving side.
At least with RFXCom and Domoticz, you have to assign it to some custom sensor and then provide which exactly units there are.
I am planning to contact the RFXCom developers so that we add support also for my devices in the firmware
perhaps then it will be easier
thanks! Indeed that might be helpful, though perhaps you could also talk to the openHAB devs!?
Would it be possible to give a short walk-through how it works over RFX433 in openHAB? I tried configuring, but wasn’t successful so far and i am sure the problem is between keyboard and chair
With MQTT it’s working really nicely and I can only say: great job you did with that device! Perhaps adding battery and getting it a bit smaller would be one step to improve it, but I am very satisfied with it. The Co2 sensor does it job and with a rule, it now automated my ventilation system to keep Co2 below 1000 ppm.
unrelated to openHAB I figured that your browser adapter config app does seem to like large networks. When I am in a same, let’s say, 192.168.1.x network the adapter is automatically discovered.
I am using, however, 2 network adapters in my system and have a 172.16.x.y and 10.a.b.c network. There the app does not find the air monitor. Could you perhaps provide the possibility to manually enter the IP address to connect to the device (currently I only see auto-discover), so the app doesn’t have to scan that large network (though it never finds it and I suppose it just looks in the /24 range).
That would be an important improvement. Thanks a lot!
Aaahh… yeah… i will fix this. In fact i alrady added it in my development version. I hope soon i will be able to release it.
As for the size and battery - they are related… as the size is so big, as i had problems with power consumption (20 ma power consumption, raises the temperature by 3 degrees within 5 cm), so i had to make a bigger box so that the temperature sensor is not affected
i am now designing my next version of the control board, where this should be resolved. once it is ready - it should be easy to just buy the new board end enclosure and transfer the mor eexpensive parts into it
thanks for the reply. One bug I spotted is also, that when I add credentials for MQTT, they are not stored. I have used the command line of the configuration app and configured MQTT manually with the command, but this might be causing trouble to beginners (it also took me quite some time to figure out that credentials were not set, and that that is the cause why it didn’t connect to MQTT).
Received my sensor this week in the mail. Will try to get it configured this weekend, hope I manage as it’s my first MQTT device. Will share my experience once I have it up and running.
It took me a bit longer but I really like these sensors.
It wasn’t as straightforward as I hoped, documentation is minimal (the chrome app for configuration is not working in my case but the URL did work and so I managed to set it up).
I struggled most with MQTT, as this was new to me; Installed it on my sinology but there seems to be a bug preventing the package to start. So that took a while before I figured out how to solve for that. For those planning to go there as well I figured out afterwards that the openhabian now has a new feature in the config menu to install MQTT broker, so that was probably a cleaner and quicker way than the sinology route.
Once you figured out MQTT the rest really worked well. and as said really like the sensor and will be ordering some more.
There are a few things that I haven’t figured out yet so Vladimir maybe you can help out?
I haven’t managed to activate the built in LUX sensor. There is a check bow in the configuration tool but when I check that one the values sent are %LUX% so no actual LUX values.
There was another setting I wasn’t sure about it was a parameter to define when going into sleep mode, as I was afraid that the sensor would disconnect I put the value to 0 i.e. never go to sleep. Not sure what the best setting is as I could find any documentation about this setting.
Aahh, just now i noticed that you wrote here about this. Sorry for the delayed response. I was quite a busy so there are few tweaks that need to be done so that everything is simplfiied.
For the %LUX%, please use %LDR%, the enabling of the light sensor is a new feature, and this is why it isn’t yet too good integrated into the config tool. LUX is reserved for the lux sensors that really send LUX values. And the LDR simply sends some value from 0-1024, and you can then check what values you will get in your case (also depends on the enclosure a bit
For the sleep, the idea is that if the sensor is not going to sleep it consumes ~70 ma, while when it sleeps it consumes 12 ma. And this may affect a bit the temperature sensor.
In general the offset is linear in the range of 0-1 degrees. So i plan to add some calibration mode, that automatically determines the number (but i am not sure when i will ge time for this). There is another field “Temperature Adjustment” that can be used to compensate.
The devices with CDM7160 and temp sensor, do not require it. All other need 0.4-1 degrees compensation
Thanks, haven’t had a chance to check the LDR yet, will do and sounds exactly what I need. So perfect. Have placed my next order already in the meantime. The sensor works very stable and very well.
