Home Control And Automation

With all the bad things happening with hacking of IoT devices I’ve refused to purchase any other then a Spot, mainly just to play with. I’ve even taken my live streaming weather cam off-line and have closed all forwarded ports. There is more that I could do but I figure if someone really wants to get in bad enough, they will. “locking the door” keeps out the casual intruder.

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That’s why we do not use cloud-connect controllers. There is an entire industry of secure devices available for control and automation that are for us big boys.

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I am, but did not respond because I have no intention of linking my WF station to it.

Started out with Wink, because it was easy for my DW to use and we were sort of forced into that ecosystem by a smart Wink air conditioner purchase. I subsequently upgraded to a Wink2 hub, which executes a lot of the control stuff locally and not in the cloud. I also have a Samsung SmartThings2 hub sitting on the shelf, because I really wasn’t impressed by it.

I went off-script, and picked up an Apple HomeKit BLE front door lock. Both me and my DW have Apple Watches, so the convenience of telling Siri to unlock the front door without having to fish out a phone is a huge sales feature. I have since installed the open-source HomeBridge package in a Raspberry Pi, which presents the Wink2 devices to HomeKit so that Siri can control them.

My favorite automation task so far is the one that is triggered when I pull into the driveway and unlocks the front door, turns on the outside and garage lights, and turns everything off in 5 minutes. Don’t even need the watch any more…

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DW means DreamWeaver to me. What does DW mean when you use it?

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Darling Wife or Darn Wife, depending on the phase of the moon… :innocent:

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Here are some examples how I will be using the weather data.

Turn off irrigation system if it is raining.
Turn off outdoor fountains if wind is high.
Turn on attic exhaust fans if outside temperature is high.
Turn on ceiling fans if outside temperature is high.
Turn on whole house attic fan, turn off HVAC cooling in summer if outside temperature is low enough to cool the house.
Turn on outside accent lighting when lux falls below a set limit.

I’ll have an entire new set of tasks when the Breathe is available.

Gary

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^^^ First world problems :wink: ^^^

Some people want to keep up with the Jones. I want to get away from the Jones! My neighbor to one side is 400+ acres of undeveloped/wooded parkland, and my neighbor to the other side is 2,000+ acres of state forest. The only accent lighting outside is ample floodlights to spot bears when going to/from the driveway after sunset, and I’m sure that the deer would love to have a drinking fountain in the months when water doesn’t freeze. I can take the pneumatic impact gun outside at 3:00 AM to change tires without fear of disturbing the neighbors, and Bambi my landscaper keeps the lawn neatly trimmed (and eats anything else planted outside).

The only home automation rule that I can conceive that would require access to weather data is one that turns on my diesel pickup’s engine block heater on work days when the outside temperature is below 5F, but it is just easier to leave it plugged in continuously on the few nights per year when it gets that cold…

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It’s not a first world problem at all. I’ll be doing much the same in a third-world country.

My goals are based on saving as much of “my” money as I can balanced with pleasing my family and taking care of the little creatures than roam the neighborhood.

While I live in an urban area at the base of the Rockies and suffer all the conveniences of modern life I appreciate at night that one can witness the sighting of coyote, fox and wolf coming to hunt for rabbit and other small tidbits of food. Not to mention to occasional teenager or burglar that is up to no good.

As keeping up with the Jones, I don’t know how they live. It’s all I can do to keep up with life, taxes and technology; and technology is why we are here. I have a gas drinking SUV that I keep in a warm garage so I specifically don’t have to worry about pre-heating it and cleaning off a foot of snow in the morning.

Gary

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Once I get a station, I plan to use it to feed the local conditions into home automation software. I use the local conditions to set the inside thermostat and control a whole house fan.

I created a plug-in for HomeSeer to read the UDP data directly into HomeSeer. It’s only been tested with some simulation software I wrote, but it’s available on the HomeSeer forums. If any tester have HomeSeer and want to try it out, I’d appreciate any feedback. It’s a work-in-progress so ideas for features and improvements are welcome.

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I’m intending to use the WeatherFlow with my home automation system, currently the Universal Devices ISY. The climate module built into the ISY does not provide data with sufficient resolution or accuracy (updates every 30 minutes, and it’s a few miles away) to be very effective.

Uses of weather data in my home automation setup:

Current:

  • Irrigation - I use a RainMachine irrigation controller, which consumes NOAA and Wunderground data
  • HVAC - I adjust heating/cooling levels based upon temperature and humidity
  • Lighting - I adjust indoor lighting levels based upon cloud cover, ambient light and sun position

Future

  • Awnings and shades - I intend to adjust awning and shade positions based upon sun position, ambient light, solar radiation, wind, etc. The intent is to protect not only people but nice furniture and wood floors from sun damage

Most of this should be greatly improved upon with the arrival of the Sky. I’m not a developer, but I’m interested in the ability to locally provide WeatherFlow data to my home automation controller without a reliance on the cloud. The fact that WeatherFlow can produce UDP data locally is potentially interesting.

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Bumbershoot,

Your setup has a lot of similarities to mine. I’ve been using a different local weather station because using climate data from the ISY was too far away and about 1000 ft difference in elevation which always made the temperature off by a few (up to about 10) degrees. I haven’t really played with what it takes to get data directly into the ISY. For any logic that requires local conditions, I’m using HA software and just having that route control through the ISY. Maybe via a node server it would be possible to get the WeatherFlow data directly into the ISY which would be ideal. I know a couple of the test group folks have an ISY too as I leaned about WeatherFlow from the ISY forums, don’t know if they’ve looked into a way to get the data directly to the ISY.

It would be fairly simple to create a program that reads the UDP data and uses it to set ISY variables, but that does involve running a small program somewhere. But I think some of the new capabilities of the ISY 5.x firmware will make it even easier.

I also have a RainMachine for irrigation. I’m not aware of any way of getting it to use local data though.

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Local data for RainMachine will come through Wunderground and from my ISY. Of course the Wunderground cloud is involved, but the data will be local.

The ISY, when running the 5.x.x series of firmware, you can run the Nodelink node server, which contains support for the RainMachine. In my default RainMachine program, I irrigate close to the minimum I can. The RainMachine mostly adjusts by using data from sensors, placed into variables. I augment the RainMachine program by adding irrigation based on soil moisture content, temperature in my beds, and hopefull soon, wind, etc.

Additionally, see this post on the UDI forum page for placing you data into the ISY (via the Climate module). There are ways to get it done. A node server for WeatherFlow data on the ISY would be ideal. If I was a programmer, I’d be working on it!

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Probably not the place for RainMachine discussions so I’ll just close it out by saying, you must have a newer version of the RainMachine than I do. I have an original model and it only gets data from NOAA.

I’ve also been pushing my local data to wpsweather.com so that I can get my local data into the climate module. I may just end up creating a simple program that does the same with the UDP data from the WeatherFlow. Currently I’m using a RPi for that and will probably use for WeatherFlow as well…

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Unfortunately, our house does not have eves, so if we are going out, and there is any hint that it may rain that day, we have to close all the windows. In a climate that is often in the 30’s ©, with very high humidity, this is not ideal. At some point, I will get roller shutters on some of the windows.

I will have a rule that if rain is detected, close the shutters. Another rule will open the shutters 5 minutes after the rain stops. I probably will also have a rule that closes the shutters if lightning is 5kms away, that would re-open them if lightning hadn’t been detected for 30 minutes, and it rain hasn’t been detected for 5 minutes.

I also want a rule where; if music is playing on the Pool/BBQ Sonos, and lightning is detected, pause the music, speak a message, and then resume playback. I would have different messages for the different lightning steps (>35kms, 20km, 10km, 5kms), and would set conditions so that a message would only interrupt once for each distance, apart from the 5km one.

I will do the automation with SmartThings and webCoRE. webCoRE is an incredibly powerful rule engine designed for SmartThings. There isn’t much condition wise it can’t seem to do in the short time I have been using it.

As far as it being cloud-based, we don’t really get internet dropouts - not that I have seen over the past 14 years I’ve lived here. Usually only if you are changing service providers, you may not have internet for a few days while the change over is happening. SmartThings is known to go offline occasionally, and power is very occasionally lost in major storms. If we were going out for a whole day, and thunderstorms were forecast, we would probably close the windows anyway, so that’s not really a problem, so feel confident enough in the technology.

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You just named a few of the reasons I don’t use “cloud” services for automation.

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I’m planning to connect the WF’s to home automation.
Not sure if I can get a sensor directly through the UDP broadcasts, but possible via an ESP8266 and MQTT.
My most pressing question - in anticipation of the arrival of the Air and Sky - is how to present the weather data. My current weather station is stand alone and has a display in the bathroom.
Would like to replace it with a tablet. One of the requirements is it should show a clock as well as weather data.
How do you consume your sensor data?

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Yep, my solution is OpenHAB and it’s habpanel. The binding is already done with use of UDP and works. Start at https://www.openhab.org/ and for the binding more info is here https://community.openhab.org/t/weatherflow-smart-weather-station-binding/36332/71

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@zacofany Has Bill Welliver joined this community? If not, please encourage him to do so. He will find us very helpful in development of his code.

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I’m currently working with Indigo and a Gen 5 Z-Stick by Aen Labs. About to add an Insteon PowerLinc to facilitate Insteon capability. I’m in the learning process at the moment, so I’ll be glad to tag along on this thread.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: SmartThings, WebCore and Web Socket Events?