discussion General Home Automation / Home Assistant thread

[zoob]

Impulse bought an Airthings Wave Mini since they were on sale for $70 at Amazon. Really wish it read CO2 levels.

Airthings put out a reader on github so I added it to my airthings_mqtt reader.





Modified their sample find_wave.py so it can detect the model.



Here are my CO2 levels with the house on AC over the last few days. You can tell when the windows were closed and opened.

 

[JD]

So your CO2 ends up over 1500ppm as well when the house is "closed up"? At least I don't feel as concerned...

I've had an Awair for a bit over a year, and noticed the CO2 in my house typically gets pretty high without having any windows open (or the HRV running continuously). I think generally people say anything over 1000ppm is "bad" and makes you fatigued, reduces your focus/mental capacity, etc. I'd tend to agree, since on days when it peaks around 1800ppm is when I feel the worst - tried/sleepy/no energy.

 

[zoob]

Yes I agree with that statement about over feeling tired at over 1000ppm. We had AC blasting, so while we felt comfortable, we felt tired, and I didn't even tell my wife about the logging. Going out for an evening walk after the sunset is instantly re-energizing.

How do you like the Awair unit? It seems to be one of the more reasonably priced units. The other IAQ companies that I was looking at are NetAtmo and IQAir. People seem to dislike NetAtmo as a company, and IQAir AirVisual Pro is really pricey.

 

[JD]

No real complaints with the data from the Awair or the usability of it. Not sure how it integrates with something like HA, but I see there's a "developer option" to enable a local web server on it. It's nice to have a visual number and graph though that you can just glance at while sitting in the living room (where I have it).

I have the Awair 2nd Edition (wood box), when I bought it from them, UPS dinged me for brokerage even though they had said it was all covered. Thankfully they refunded it all after providing the UPS receipt.

Couple weeks ago the PM2.5 sensor's fan starting buzzing quite loudly. Opened a ticket to find that it was out of the 1yr warranty now and their service center was closed due to COVID. I'd have to pay to ship it there and unsure about the cost of the work. I looked up the part number on DigiKey and ordered a new sensor (came out to $74CAD). Swapped it out and seems to be working fine. Not sure if it ended up cheaper or not, but at least I had it fixed in 2 days.

 

[zoob]

GitHub - zhoulander/atw-mqtt: Airthings Wave 2 MQTT

Airthings Wave 2 MQTT. Contribute to zhoulander/atw-mqtt development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Might try to turn it into a native HA integration for people who run it on a Pi with BLE.

 

[Inik]

Do it!

 

[zoob]

Finally got this power meter monitor working. First tried doing this about 4-5 years ago but didn't have a good grasp about how things fit together.

The utility company here used to give these power monitors out for free so you could track your real-time usage and estimate costs. They work by reading IR pulses off your power meter and transmitting the data to a receiver unit. Put together some things to ingest this data into Home Assistant via MQTT.

Blue Line Innovations BLI-28000 power meter
Arduino Uno
Superheterodyne 433 MHz receiver
Raspberry Pi B

Resources:
Discussion about the power monitor: https://scruss.com/blog/2013/12/03/blueline-black-decker-power-monitor-rf-packets/
Arduino sketch: https://github.com/scruss/Powermon433

Arduino decodes the 433 MHz packets and dumps it in json-like payload via serial-over-usb.
Raspberry Pi B reads the Arduino and sends MQTT payload to the broker
Home Assistant reads the MQTT config data and payloads (reused lots of code from the airthings project)

GitHub - zhoulander/Powermon433MQTT: ATmega (Arduino) decoding of EM100B and PowerCost Monitor

ATmega (Arduino) decoding of EM100B and PowerCost Monitor - zhoulander/Powermon433MQTT

github.com

https://imgur.com/a/9KIJ4Bz

 

[lowfat]

Finally got this power meter monitor working. First tried doing this about 4-5 years ago but didn't have a good grasp about how things fit together.

The utility company here used to give these power monitors out for free so you could track your real-time usage and estimate costs. They work by reading IR pulses off your power meter and transmitting the data to a receiver unit. Put together some things to ingest this data into Home Assistant via MQTT.

Blue Line Innovations BLI-28000 power meter
Arduino Uno
Superheterodyne 433 MHz receiver
Raspberry Pi B

Resources:
Discussion about the power monitor: https://scruss.com/blog/2013/12/03/blueline-black-decker-power-monitor-rf-packets/
Arduino sketch: https://github.com/scruss/Powermon433

Arduino decodes the 433 MHz packets and dumps it in json-like payload via serial-over-usb.
Raspberry Pi B reads the Arduino and sends MQTT payload to the broker
Home Assistant reads the MQTT config data and payloads (reused lots of code from the airthings project)

GitHub - zhoulander/Powermon433MQTT: ATmega (Arduino) decoding of EM100B and PowerCost Monitor

ATmega (Arduino) decoding of EM100B and PowerCost Monitor - zhoulander/Powermon433MQTT

github.com

https://imgur.com/a/9KIJ4Bz

Could you use an ESP8266 and just send the data over wifi to the mqtt server? So you don't need a RPi?

 

[zoob]

Could you use an ESP8266 and just send the data over wifi to the mqtt server? So you don't need a RPi?

Yes that’s possible, I think someone has already made a fork with ESP support. For my setup I’m already using a Pi3B for BLE and a Zigbee stick so it’s just one more thing to plug in via USB (and one less wifi client).

 

[zoob]

Curiosity got the better of me and I now have a pair of ESP32 boards on their way...