MySensors Network at a High School Farm

[bpair]

I have been creating a sensor network at a local high school and the mysensors project is basically what makes it possible. I just launched a website on amazon documenting some of what is deployed with live graphs.

http://growing.education/index.php/farm-monitoring-and-automation/garinger-sensor-network/

At this point we are mainly just monitoring and collecting data, so my controller is a very simple node-red installation that saves data locally and transmits data via MQTT to mosquitto runing on an Amazon EC2 instance. Another installation of node-red again saves data to InfluxDB and Grafana displays the data very nicely.

We have three active nodes. One sensebender node running off battery and another solar powered node. A sample of the graphing is below. Check it out. The site is new so I suspect there are many typos and broken links. Thanks again to this community for helping me.

[HarryDutch]

Wow! What a great project. It's on the top of my list now. Thanks!!

[Yveaux]

@bpair Your setup is comparable to the one I'm running at home. I only have MQTT inbetween the MySensors network and Node-RED, and only one Node-RED instance which directly posts to InfluxDB, running locally.
Especially Grafana is simply awesome and has been the only graphing tool capable of serving all my needs.
Thanks for sharing!

[andriej]

@Yveaux what controller do you use?
I currently have domoticz and I'm wondering about getting it somehow to system.

[bpair]

@Yveaux Yeah Grafana has been great. I would have something similar to your setup but the greenhouse only has a cell phone hotspot so I wanted to get the data out to the cloud with as little traffic as possible. Then display all the graphs from there (grafana on Amazon)

[Yveaux]

@andriej I experimented with various systems and settled with OpenHab, although I'm not very happy with it. I'm mostly monitoring at the moment so Grafana will do the trick.

[Yveaux]

@bpair it seems overkill to also store the data and run Grafana locally, but I can imagine this works for you.

[FotoFieber]

:+1:
@bpair What gateway-sketch (standard serial?) do you use with which version of mysensors?

My setup is quite similar (influx, node-red, grafana) but no cloud deployment. Most sensors are based on mysensors, but there are others (homematic with homegear and netatmo).

[bpair]

@Yveaux The install in the greenhouse is basically because the internet connection is costly and not reliable. I have an old linux computer in teh greenhouse for the following reasons:

1. To save the date even if there is no internet
2. To display a nice dashboard on the computer in the greenhouse (looks impressive)
3. To allow students to look at the graphs locally without internet

[bpair]

@FotoFieber Just the standard serial gateway. There is a nice node-red node for parsing mysensors serial data. I then have some basic code that recognizes the specific data, e.g. node 9 child 10 is the aquaponics water temperature, so that I can store more information in influxd to mak ethe graphs better.

I also have node-red respond to the metric/imperial question. That is basically it.

[bpair]

And I just noticed the internet has been down at the greenhouse since early Saturday! More reason to have a local install.