Wired Sensors

Hardware Home Automation
1

I am attempting to build a wired only setup.

Door sensors and windows sensors seem easy enough with MQTT and Raspberri pis. Same with things like motion sensors or cameras.

But I can’t seem to find a way to do remote power monitoring and control, or light switch control. Everything i find is either

  1. do it yourself, i am far from an electrician
  2. wifi or zwave (want to avoid wireless)
  3. $500 / strip (tripplite and apc) and would require me writing some middle wear to connect.

Is this even a reasonable thing to try?

2

Arduino with Ethernet shield and Relay

1 Like
3

How about the sonoff pow?

4

He said NOT wireless

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5

@Matt_Ruge to clarify what wireless are you trying to avoid? This could be the large part of the challenge.

There are some off the shelf sensors for power monitoring but almost all use some type of wireless protocol to send the data to openHAB. I am not familiar with any that don’t actually. For me wanting to not use wireless in this use case might be making it harder on ones self. That is without building your own.

If you could find one of the esp based ones I suppose you could attach to the seria port and use the already built hardware. Tasmota does support some level of serial interface, not sure about esp easy.

6

I agree, The best I could find without building it myself was to buy some datacenter grade strip from apc or tripplite. But those are expensive, and i would still need to use a PI or something to get openhab to talk to it. Or write a binding myself.

I was really excited about the ubiquity mPower strip. it had ethernet. But I keep reading horror stories about all the mFi stuff.

the sensors are gonna be spread out over 2 floors, and ~6000 sqft. so i was concerned about them being “finicky”

The easy answer is to just ‘suck it up’ and bi some good zwave stuff or setup wifi. One of the guys i work with claims the zwave isn’t all that dependable. But maybe people here have had better experiences.