Internet of “things” I wish I could take credit for that phrase. I am as much a “thing” as my leak sensor.
I own and run a company. I have boots on the ground (employees) executing (in real life) the moves of players who are engaged in the MMPORPG called capitalism. I am not going to go into that here, because this is about the other “things”.
The house we sold was a full smart home, that I had built to be a smart home before there was such a thing. I started from scratch building my own modules, switches, etc. and integrating them into a (home coded) “dashboard” etc, etc.
I let her (Bridget) evolve with the times as “off the shelf” products became available and reliable. The she became Alexa…
I had built the voice activated house that I had read about in PoSci in the 70’s (she even teases my cat like the mythical “Breslin” of that article.
Then, we sold it all and moved into a semi vintage, semi high-end class A diesel pusher. Most of the systems are 12 V, what to do?
- Install solar and retrofit a big (lithium) battery.
- shed as much ac to the 12V buss as possible. NO MORE WALL WORTS, no more phantom loads, no more inverting to 120V AC just to buck it back down to 12, or 5V.
- Integrate a wireless weather station and publish it to the web in real time.
- build custom ESP32 based (12V powered) Nodes, for switching lights, monitoring parameters, managing surveillance and security, etc.
- Build a dashboard (based on homeassistant) to land it all in one place.
- Create more RV compatible “nodes”
- create automations to automagically take care of the details.
So far, I have built
- “Automation” local Area network (LAN) (wired/Wireless)
- 2, custom “works with Alexa” switch nodes to control some of the (12V) lighting.
- Ambient weather station. publishing “hyper local, real time” weather to numerous weather models. https://ambientweather.net/dashboard/ad21af86937e3a979a7411b911521b43
- 2, Ppod (wireless, motion sensing ) “drop cams” to provide motion detection and video of my immediate perimeter (WIFI range)
- 2 LoraWan sensor nodes (motion detection up to a kilometer)
- Home Assistant instance (rvan) accessible from anywhere.
it all runs over the internet
Stay tuned…
“One becomes very aware of their power usage when they get most of it from the sun.”