squeakyfrogfarm on Nostr: In my prior post on my #homestead #automation efforts, I mentioned moving to Home ...

In my prior post on my #homestead #automation efforts, I mentioned moving to Home Assistant from my somewhat primitive home brew system. There are a couple of big advantages to using HA. I expanded the wifi coverage at the farm to include the greenhouses, so I could use cheap Esp8266 boards that have wifi built in, instead of the more expensive LoRa modules in my first setup. It's easier to configure and program than programming Arduino from scratch, once you learn the syntax and structure of its configuration language.

Pictured below is one of the temperature sensors for this setup. A knockoff clone "Wemos D1 mini" and a DS18B20 temp sensor. There's a resistor soldered into the cable (it's the the shrink-wrapped lumpy part of the cable), and that's all. Three cheap components plus the power supply (these run off standard micro USB power, so cheap adapters are plentiful) is all there is. I use these to monitor the greenhouses, freezers, fridge, etc. I think they probably cost about six bucks each to make, and they're tiny enough to fit anywhere.

I have one built into a solar light like in my previous post, with a couple capacitors to buffer the battery power. Wifi takes much more energy than LoRa, so that one sleeps most of the time and only updates the temperature reading once every ten minutes.

A couple of screenshots from the HomeAssistant app on my phone to round out this post, and I'll post more details on the whole system later.