2010-04-18 #1

Hardware Projects

As there is now a bit more time for hardware experiments, I again started several microcontroller based hardware projects. I prefer the Atmel AVR microcontrollers as they are cheap, powerful and have several neaty features.

EIB / home automation

I am planing to build a new house, intended to be a "smart" energy efficient house. So I am planing to have EIB for home automation as this standard is the most promising available standard right now. There are a huge set of components already in place. But it is a bit prizy :(. I hope that the energy efficiency achieved with the bus and the convenience will justify the effort.

I build a test board for EIB-evaluation and testing. Have a look at this youtube video

Furthermore I played a bit with this device FUL and tried to establish a new firmware beeing able to send telegrams to the bus. Unfortunately my development FUL's transmitter seems to be broken and it is only able to receive the telegrams. I was also expecting to develop kind of EIB components (switch actors, sensors, etc.) But it seems that the components are not that much demanded and busware is at the moment not working on EIB-tools.

FS20 Moduls

Already in the last year I developed an automatized watering system radio based FS20 system for my garden using also rain barrels. So I can start the watering sequence on browser (fhem) by just one click.

Following two sensors are missing:

• humidity sensor to automatically decide if a watering is needed
• rain barrel empty sensor to decide if water should be taken from water tap or from the rain barrel.

Fortunately Gardena has a soil humidity sensor for their system. So I started to develop a modul to send the sensor results on FS20 radio system. Have a look on GardenaBodenfeuchteSensorFS20Modul

With a slightly changed circuit and firmware also the rain barrel empty sensor will be realised.