Environment control? - Free or Open Source automation e.g. DIY Arduino or similar?

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robchenski

Member
I was hoping to find an example of some environment controller that can be DIY'd. There's a few that had a go, some that went commercial...
But I can't find anything solid. I've done plenty of searching and tried as many projects out as I can (I'm prefering esp8266 - nodemcu). Did I miss something?

Do we have any comunity projects that anyone could recommend?

Timed/Switching of fans, lights, heaters, coolers etc. And monitoring of temperatures, humidity and so on.

Maybe even something super simple - robustness is of paramount importance.

I've got a heating controlled propagator system I made using ESP8266, MQTT for feed back I'd be willing to share (worked well for me so far running about a year or so).

I'm not the worlds best programmer by a long shot but I could try and help if there's any colaboration to be had. I'm currently building something so naturally I'm on the hunt for code to re-purpose ;-)

So far I've got a basic controller built on top of the Homie-esp8266, and Blynk as the user interface. Must not over complicate this lol.

I would love to see something useful and free for the comunity if it doesn't exist already?
Any ideas... please holla - Thanks
 
Renfro

Renfro

Well-Known Member
Seems to me that most just grab a good environmental controller like the Autopilot and call it done.
 
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R3plica

Active Member
My new setup is gone with esphome on nodemcu over network to home assistant. I prefer the easy setup of the YAML. At the moment mine is very basic, reads pressure transducer and tells relays when to turn pump on and off between pressures, solenoid relays on timer. I must still get around to adding in tempreture/humidity/fan control ect. But shouldn't be to difficult with the digital sensors and pwm for fan. Nice thing about esphome is that the automation are performed on the node itself so the MQTT broker doesn't effect it, home assistant is used for the automation front end. But you can also perform the actions and automation through home assistant. Prefer it to blynk
 
R

robchenski

Member
Renfro said:
Seems to me that most just grab a good environmental controller like the Autopilot and call it done.
Click to expand...
Thanks
Just looked at that - I'd love to try one (100% I'm taking it apart) but I'm gonna make my own or grow an open source one. Way out of my budget anyway (didn't even look at the prices). Not sure it's open source either
 
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robchenski

Member
R3plica said:
My new setup is gone with esphome on nodemcu over network to home assistant. I prefer the easy setup of the YAML. At the moment mine is very basic, reads pressure transducer and tells relays when to turn pump on and off between pressures, solenoid relays on timer. I must still get around to adding in tempreture/humidity/fan control ect. But shouldn't be to difficult with the digital sensors and pwm for fan. Nice thing about esphome is that the automation are performed on the node itself so the MQTT broker doesn't effect it, home assistant is used for the automation front end. But you can also perform the actions and automation through home assistant. Prefer it to blynk
Click to expand...
I really do like the look of esphome and home assistant - I was sorely tempted to have a punt down that route - both those are lovely platforms. I didn't because I saw difficulties installing Hass on my Beaglebone Black (and no RPI here yet) and I can't work out how to front end the thing if I'm not running Hass. At the moment I pass most data (mqtt and (blynk - which I'm not 100% convinced about yet)) for reading purposes through Node Red. Like you I see the importance of autonomy from the broker.

I can't like your approach - but I might not have the hardware to try it yet.

So can you tell me please if you are happy with stability and robustness of esphome?
 
R

robchenski

Member
4ftRoots said:
Try out Mycodo with Rpi. I have it running my tent. Tis great.

Mycodo: https://github.com/kizniche/Mycodo
Click to expand...
Very cool - damn I need a Rpi to try that out. Maybe several because Mycodo looks so useful. I could PID the temperature in my espresso machine too.
Thanks for the heads up - I've mostly been on planet esp8266 because they are so cheap and I spend all my cash (not that I have any) on weed and boats. I guess I'd missed Mycodo as an option - I'd better get some pi on..

Is it stable?
 
R

robchenski

Member
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4ftRoots

Well-Known Member
robchenski said:
Very cool - damn I need a Rpi to try that out. Maybe several because Mycodo looks so useful. I could PID the temperature in my espresso machine too.
Thanks for the heads up - I've mostly been on planet esp8266 because they are so cheap and I spend all my cash (not that I have any) on weed and boats. I guess I'd missed Mycodo as an option - I'd better get some pi on..

Is it stable?
Click to expand...
Very stable. The dev is also super active. If you need a sensor added, or anything really, you can hit him up and he will try to add it. Usually super quickly.
 
R

R3plica

Active Member
robchenski said:
I really do like the look of esphome and home assistant - I was sorely tempted to have a punt down that route - both those are lovely platforms. I didn't because I saw difficulties installing Hass on my Beaglebone Black (and no RPI here yet) and I can't work out how to front end the thing if I'm not running Hass. At the moment I pass most data (mqtt and (blynk - which I'm not 100% convinced about yet)) for reading purposes through Node Red. Like you I see the importance of autonomy from the broker.

I can't like your approach - but I might not have the hardware to try it yet.

So can you tell me please if you are happy with stability and robustness of esphome?
Click to expand...
I am very happy with esphome and Hassos. I did have issues at first with SD cards corrupting but that's more a hardware pi issue. Once I changed the pi to boot from ssd with big enough cache it's been running like a dream. As long as you keep a backup of your config files if anything does go wrong it takes 20 minutes to reinstall and restore config files. As for the robustness of esphome. There is lots of sensors already available but anything that isn't can still be called using a lambda/c++ call like you would with arduino. What I like about the Yaml coding is the simplicity of it. For a relay switch it's 4 or 5 lines and simple to follow. Ie platform is switch, pin type, pin number, identifier and then from there you can create the automation for the switch. The other benefit is creating environment zones on the hassio front end. So you can have your grow room info and switches running through hassio but also have your nest controller, lights, smart TV, cctv detection alarms, voice automation, ect all in one place. You actually have the 2 options with hassos. As hassos can install esphome you can do the automation on the node itself so if your WiFi network goes down it will still continue working but only the front end information will be unavailable. If you went the route of handling the automation in hassio, any network downtime will cause the automation to break. If you don't have a pi you can also run hassos in a docker or virtual environment to try it out.
 
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