Garage Node!



  • Hi everyone!

    I've been tinkering with DIY home automation for over a year and discovered MySensors just over 3 months ago. If any MySensor dev's are reading this, THANKS! I've had a ton of fun building up my custom sensor network. I don't have many smart devices at my house, but I can control my living room lights (Philips Hue), kitchen lights (Philips Hue) and outdoor garage lights (GE Zwave switch) using a Raspberry Pi and OpenHAB. I have a detached garage and I thought it would be useful for me if my outdoor garage lights would automatically turn on past sunset when I opened my garage door. That way, I wouldn't have to fumble around with the keys to my house in the dark if I came home late at night. To accomplish this, I decided to monitor the position of my garage door and the time of day. OpenHAB was able to determine the time of day with the Astro binding, but I needed some kind of sensor to determine what state my garage door was in. I decided that I wanted to build a node that would collect information from sensors throughout my garage and send it wireless to my Raspberry PI via the MySensors network. Currently, I just want to monitor the state of my garage door but I wanted this node to allow future sensors to be added to it easily.

    I started by making the perf board for the mico-controller and all the I/O. This was the first board I've made since college, so it's kinda ugly.
    0_1535157971901_20180702_165601.jpg
    0_1535158034329_20180702_165606.jpg

    I built two more perf boards, one for +5V and +3.3V linear power supplies and another one with two I2C I/O expanders, PCF8574's.

    0_1535158079053_20180705_153122.jpg

    0_1535158271089_20180707_151159.jpg
    Totally un-necessary, but i had a LCD display lying around, so I thought that would spice things up nicely.

    0_1535158295075_20180707_154720.jpg

    0_1535158359629_20180707_154730.jpg
    I used a cheap plastic project box to house the electronics and 9 pin D-sub connectors for a cheap and simple way to connect external sensors to the Garage Node.
    0_1535158381591_20180710_222244.jpg
    I had a temperature/humidity sensor lying around, so why not monitor that too?
    0_1535158409725_20180711_203539.jpg

    Here's the Garage Node's final resting place (sorry for the blurry photo)! To detect if the garage door is closed or open, I used a hall effect sensor and glued a magnet to my garage door.

    0_1535158914666_20180824_205602.jpg

    What other ways I want to use this Node:

    1. Monitor the garage window's state
    2. Monitor my side garage door's state
    3. Add the ability to control my garage door (open/close)
      -I need to figure out message signing before I do this...
    4. Add sensors to detect if my car is in my garage
    5. Add motion sensors to automate my garage lights
    6. Add a simple user interface to Garage Node using the LCD and a few push buttons mounted to the project box to help me debug my sensors within my garage during install or failure.

    Does anyone have any ideas/feedback?

    Thanks!


  • Mod

    Maybe next time you could add a flash chip for Ota firmware and use I2C sensors to make wiring a lot simpler. You may consider using one of the many pcb available on openhardware.io to shrink down the size of that node 😁



  • This post is deleted!


  • @gohan I'm really interested in the OTA firmware updates, I'll have to check that feature out. Yeah, the pcbs's on openhardware.io look great, I just had the perf boards lying around, so I thought I would use them up. Thanks!


  • Plugin Developer

    My thoughts

    • wow, hardcore oldschool.
    • what are the ports on the bottom for?
    • that screw spacing is pretty smart
    • nice housing
    • add monitoring for weird fumes and gasses? BME680 or something?
    • Use the Nano Wireless Expansion Board and save yourself a lot of trouble?


  • @alowhum said in Garage Node!:

    hardcore

    Hey, sorry for the late reply! Just getting back into MySensors after a break. If you're referring to the Dsub ports on the bottom of the plastic enclosure, I just broke out 5V, COM and I/O from the two PCF8574 I/O expanders. I'll have to checkout the Nano wireless expansion board, half the fun for me is the perfboard soldering :). The gas sensor is a great idea too!


  • Banned

    Hey there, I am also in the process of building the same. Getting a lot of help from you. Thanks.


Log in to reply
 

Suggested Topics

0
Online

11.2k
Users

11.1k
Topics

112.5k
Posts