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I bought my first RPi six months ago, and now I have four (two 4s, two zeros), and six arduinos. My uses are all brutally utilitarian. One pi 4 is openhab, gr
by madaxe_again 6y ago
I bought my first RPi six months ago, and now I have four (two 4s, two zeros), and six arduinos.
My uses are all brutally utilitarian.
One pi 4 is openhab, grafana, mqtt broker etc., and the other is doing all the network gumph - vpns, qos, Wi-Fi ap, Bluetooth presence, LoRa. One zero is a controller in a micro hydro system I’m building, the other runs a couple of remote cameras.
The arduinos are being used in a lora sensor network, using dinky batteries and solar panels - they’re so low power it’s ridiculous - most of them using ultrasonic rangefinders to measure depth in tanks (water, gasoline) and monitor river levels here and upstream - we live in a mill, so being able to see the delta-h will hopefully save us from a surprise flood this winter. The government operated river gauges were all destroyed in the floods last year, and haven’t yet been replaced. I’m managing to build serviceable river gauges for under €100 a pop - I might have to see if they’re interested, as I think their issue is money - they use these big mechanical gauges that I can’t see being cheap.
Another arduino is a weather station, and the last one for now is controlling a valve way, way uphill that I got bored of walking to.
Over the winter I intend to build out a heap of arduino/lora irrigation control valves, and am toying with sapping a tiny amount of energy from the water with an impeller to power the things - my ultimate aim here is to automate everything that reasonably can be, so we have more time to do the things that can’t be.
Also, damn, it’s fun to be tinkering again - 15 years of working in tech kinda killed my passion for playing with tech, but it turns out it’s still there.
- prox 6y agoThat’s pretty amazing, how you can build solutions “on the spot” (instead of buying something off the shelves) how did get started with tinkering?
- madaxe_again 6y agoAs a kid, with analogue electronics, and microcomputers. I did little to none between ‘04 and last year, when I moved off grid and got back into “gear” while installing a PV system, and got the first RPi all of six months ago because my NAS wasn’t up to running openhab - and haven’t looked back. The arduino stuff has been “buy the bits and put them together”, although some of the bits have been a bare PCB and a bunch of components. So far it’s almost paint by numbers, to be honest - I’m combining things in a somewhat novel way, but the components are all existing solutions to one degree or another.
- prox 6y agoIt’s great you got to learn as a kid. I got a class on electricity with a simple board, that was it. But that’s why I love the Pi and similar, they allow you to tinker.
- mellavora 6y agoWould be great if you could post some links to some of your sources/suppliers, I'm thinking of setting up something similar.
- zaroth 6y agoI have a problem which requires automated valve control — too many times a sprinkler failure has led to days of leaks before being noticed, so 1) I don’t want the water feed to the irrigation on when the sprinklers are not supposed to be running, and 2) I want a daily report on how many gallons went out that pipe to detect if something has changed. The issue I’m running into is all the motorized ball valves or solenoids for 3/4” water pipes seam to be total junk. Any suggestion for sourcing a decent motorized valve?
- madaxe_again 6y agoFor the one I have set up now, it’s just a standard valve on 1.25” tubing and I’ve hooked a cheap rotary solenoid up in place of the handle. Belt and braces but works reliably. Flow meters I can’t yet comment on - haven’t yet played around with anything - although it’s easy enough to take lps data and integrate that in grafana or whatever for reporting - I’m currently doing so for our PV system, watts in and out etc.