[johannes] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, a home automation setup he named Botman. While he calls it a home automation system, controlling lights and home appliances (which it does wirelessly on 433MHz) is just a small part of its functionality. The front panel of Botman includes a servo which points to laser-etched icons of the current weather. It also has a display which shows indoor and outdoor weather conditions along with the status of public transportation around [johannes]’s house.
Botman is built around an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. The Arduino has very little memory, so [johannes] used the Google Apps engine as a buffer between his Arduino and the JSON APIs of his data sources. This significantly reduces the amount of data the Arduino has to keep in memory and parse.
[johannes] also wrote an Android app that communicates with Botman. The app has buttons for controlling lights in his house and duplicates all the information shown on the front panel. [johannes] also built some logging features into Botman. The temperature readings and other information are uploaded from the Arduino to a Google Docs spreadsheet where he can view and graph them from anywhere. Check out the video after the break to see Botman in action.
My initial thought about the servo was that it indicated wind direction. That would have been a nice usage, with perhaps some leds highlighting the type of weather icons.
Neat idea, I’ve long had a super-personal dashboard on display in my house, displaying information relevant to me. Thinks like weather, if the wife’s train is running late, Google location history, a small “status” stream from my servers. The physical portion of this is neat, but that Server Horn could be made to look much nicer in just a few minutes. Quality build though. What is he using to control the lights?
I’m using the rcswitch library with a 433mhz transmitter from ebay. see https://code.google.com/p/rc-switch/wiki/List_TransmitterReceiverModules
Thanks for the link! :-)
There is another option to visualize the values from the local temp. / hum. / pressure by sending these values with JSON to http://emoncms.org/ – to display local weather it is an idea to use http://openweathermap.org/ and decode the JSON supplied values with the JSON library for Arduino published by https://blog.benoitblanchon.fr/arduino-json-v3-0/
hi! actually it is openweathermap I’m currently using. emoncms seems to be a good service, I’ll have a look at that soon! thnx for your comment!
Great project, the laser-etched icons are a lovely touch.
If you’re interested in finding out about other home automation projects, you can check out my list on hackaday.io http://hackaday.io/list/2401-home-automation
Again, not actually home automation, like someone mentioned last time…