What did you build/automated today (with pictures)?

Nicely

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I noticed a lot of people going a diy route with electronics. I am amateur in electronics (although ironically, I finished school for it), but I do some MySensors/artuidno stuff, and I built a helping hand to ease the process.

Filter has a active coal filter behind it, and light is dimmable by touch.
It has a built in power for light and fan, from glued old powerbank

Helping hand tool is often looking better then my projects but well…

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@mjcumming
Wow the result must be a mess. This is a reminder for us all to think about the corner cases especially when it comes to integration with critical devices. Could you share what valve controller are you using, and does it works reliably?

Thanks,

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I purposefully used a normally open valve. The security was setup to turn off the water valve when armed in vacation mode. I wanted a NO valve in case there was a problem with the security system (ie a prolonged power failure) and I wasn’t around to help manually turn the valve on.

Hey Huaba,

wow, you seem to have a lot of integration in OH. I like that! You may share information about the functionality and rules behind it :slight_smile:

Cheers

I have basically the following systems:
Homematic
Philips Hue
iCloud (iPhone GPS…)
Fritzbox
Samsung TV

OH is running on a Raspberry Pi.

With these components I control the temperature when we’re at home and absent, the lights, and the rollershutters will follow soon.

Here is how my basic UI looks like:

And in our kitchen I have an old iPad 2 running HABpanel:

After seeing here some pictures of HABpanel, I think I might change my colors or something, but that’s not the first priority :wink:

Also, I created the house in 3D using Sweet Home 3D. Unfortunately it doesn’t run on the old iPad, but does very well on a computer :slight_smile:
It’s integrated in HABpanel.

Here’s how it can be done: (Proof-of-concept) Interactive WebGL view with HABPanel & Sweet Home 3D!

I have some things left to do, but after more than a year of building rules and UIs I’m pretty happy with it so far :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Viktor

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Hey Bartus.
i use nodemcu boards for most of my products. I currently have one running my verical blinds using servos, and hall effect sensors.

I get random restarts, usually every couple of minutes. some times it will go hours without a restart. I have worked around this in software to update the location of the blinds when it restarts, but I was wondering if you knew what would cause this. You mentioned a shottky diode between RST and D0.

I also use GPIO 0,2,15 as i dont have enough IO pins to not use them, But this is only an issue when the board starts. Should cause issues during running.

Ive read about watchdog timers can cause issues and restarts. I dont have any delays in my code. My loop just continues and runs if there is a mqtt message.

Any info would be brilliant if you have it.

Nice plan Vradatta, what elements / sensors / actors you are using for the lights and fans? Thx

Thanks :slight_smile:

All lights are using a homematic litght switch and some Sonoff S20
The fans are controlled by a Sonoff S20 and a Sonoff Basic.

For the temperature (sensor and actor) i also use homematic
For some room i only use a a temp sensor from xiaomi

The window sensors are some xiaomi and homematic door/window contacts.

For the shutters i hacked a velux remote controll (i’m simulating a button press by a homematic actor…)

The television is controlled by a harmony hub and i also have 2 alexas to controll anything by voice.

I’m also planning to build automatic watering for the garden with arduinos, but i’m not finished yet.

@Christopher_Hemmings - honestly, it could be any number of things that are causing your restarts. I have seen some issues with controlling servos using the NodeMCU (e.g. with the crappy servos I had connected, they would oscillate at any point the wifi radio goes active), so I see how the servos could affect the NodeMCU vice versa. I hadn’t tried this yet, but maybe a low ESR capacitor between the 5V/GND lines on the servo would help filter out any noise?

Just listing things off the top of my head, I’d look at these:

  1. Make sure your 5V input is remaining steady (if you have a Fluke or a meter with a “MIN” function, you could put that across the VIN/GND pins and see if you’re dropping too low - below ~3.9 v is bad…
  2. Use the serial monitor to see what messages the NodeMCU is sending during resets - it’ll include the reason for rebooting (wdt, power loss, or any other runtime crash).
  3. Check your code for any obvious problems like dividing by 0 or other common problems.

The RST/D0 diode I put in is for programming only (after I found out there’s issues with getting some boards to go into boot mode with a straight connection).

BTW, we definitely should have a hardware section on this forum - there’s plenty of people who would be interested in having hardware discussions as they relate to their openHAB system (sensors, controllers, etc…) and that information is hard to come by at arduinoi- or other hardware specific forums.

We do: Home Automation - openHAB Community

But please guys stay on topic, so open new threads for your problems and discussions.

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Exact, and we need pictures and screen shots :wink:

Ok, Here is a quick and easy one, charging station for various devices.
A button (xiaomi?), Wall switch And a simple timer rule to turn it off and set some notification to get batteries out

Here i made my own switch with MySensors and Arduino, but anything will work basically

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I also was looking for at water valve.
But being the cheapskate I am, would not pay for a Danfoss or the like. But I won’t trust the cheap Ali ones for my main water valve.
But I found this valve actuator on Ali:


Very cheap (below tax limit in Denmark which is about $12), and actually very well made! All metal gear and heavy duty.
It turns 1/4 of a round and has micro switches to automatically stop at the ends.
Plenty of torque for even main valves.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/G1-2-Electric-Automatic-Manipulator-Shut-Off-Valve-High-Pressure-Hydraulic-Valve-for-Alarm-Gas-Water/32846376850.html

Video of it in action

The thing on top of my water meter is a home build reflective sensor. It connected to a 1-wire counter and is read by a small OpenWRT router.
The water value actuator is also connected to the 1-wire bus through a dual 1-wire switch and some relays.

This is probably the most loved HA stuff I have made. It has saved us from countless times where the garden hose has jumped of the couplings, but also has the unplanned side effect of telleing us when a shower has take too long

It sends a notification to our phones if it registers a nonstop use of 100liters of water, or if there have been a consumption nonstop for 6hours (slow leak like a running toilet).

Sorry not controlled by OpenHAB, I like to keep this things separate.
It does integrate with OH though.

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That’s fine, but I meant more for DIY hardware (Arduinos, NodeMCUs, etc…) - that forum category is a bit vague…it’d be nice to have more distinct subcategories (DIY, Lighting, Sensors, etc…) like the other main sections do. I’ve had plenty of those discussions on here to warrant a dedicated sub. But, to keep this on-topic, I’ll start a new post to ask the moderators to do so…

I guess it wasn’t clear why I mentioned we need a more specific forum for these kinds of posts, but that was my point :wink:

Happy to oblige :slight_smile: I’ve had a busy (but fun!) weekend of tinkering. Here’s one of my projects from this weekend.

I’ve redone my LED strips, adding new effects and cleaning up the code for this holiday season. And, in order to make it more of a permanent install (and increase the WAF), I’ve installed aluminum channels in my windows to hold these:

I also completely rewrote my handler rules and sitemaps to improve the readability and UI design:

And the final effect (for one of the windows):

I also updated the write-up with the new rules/sitemaps, in case others want to repeat this: NodeMCU MQTT LED Strip Controller Build & Config How-To Videos


I also received these from the fab shop:

but I’m still waiting for the touchscreen to arrive before I can put this together.

This is what the finished product should look like:

and for anyone interested, the write-up from its creator is here: - it was designed for HA, but it runs on MQTT, so no reason it shouldn’t work with openHAB…

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I found a very interesting thing on your pictures. Maybe you can tell us more about that. Ther is some tape and wire on a watermeter i guess.

Sure. It’s my watermeter reader.
Got the inspiration from here: http://jasper.sikken.nl/gwemeter/
Just happened to have some CNY70 reflective optocouplers laying around, but I guess you can use many others.

It’s connected to a comparator (basically a high amplification op-amp) and 1wire counter DS2423.
Unfortunately the DS2423 is no longer in productions, but since I already had the 1wire network setup, I managed to find a seller on Aliexpress who still sells them.

The 1wire network is connect to a WT3020 (one of the cheapest routers to run OpenWRT), through a simple serial2usb adapter with a diode and a resistor.
According to Dallas Semiconductors, the serial port approach is preferred ahead of bit banging a GPIO, because the timing puts a bit of stress on the CPU.

The router runs a simple shell script every minute, that reads the value of the counter and set off a IFTTT notification to our phones if without limits.
(IFTTT has a nice simple REST interface, great for sending notifications to phones).

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Wow, something fpr xmas holidays

Thank you

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Thanks, always inspiring to see what others are doing…

I’m dreading to start with Habpanel to increase the WAF, it just seems like a lot of work!

This is my simple panel based on standard Basic UI

then I’m building a touch panel with a 10’’ tablet with HabPanel. It’s very basic…and I’m testing its stability with the fantastic Habpanelviewer and also trying to integrate Grafana dashboard in it

There’s a lot of work to do but step by step I follow my target :slight_smile:

I have a dedicated thread in this forum. See:

Cheers

Marco

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