With the current goings on over at LiveJournal, and the realization that I'm not really paying much attention to it any more I've decided to move my meagre creative output over to ikiwiki here. My old LJ posts will remain where they are, but I won't be updating it further.

Back in the dim and distant I wrote about collecting electricity consumption data. In the intervening time and due to some hardware changes and failures I had stopped doing this.

Recently, Graeme Thomson gave a talk at ScotLUG about the system he is using to monitor temperatures around his house, using a 1-wire sensor network. Inspired by this, I decided to revisit my monitoring efforts.

Graeme's system took advantage of the fact that his house had recently been rewired and at that time he had laid in a number of twisted pair drops into each room, which could easily be patched onto his 1-wire bus.

Not wanting to run more cable around my own flat I decided to look at the possibility of doing the same thing wirelessly, and I remembered, from my Arduino tinkering, about the JeeNode project.

JeeNodes are compact, low-power Arduino-compatible AVR microcontroller boards with onboard wireless modules. They are very versatile and ideal as a basis for all sorts of wireless sensor nodes. They are also relatively inexpensive, particularly when purchased in kit form.

After a bit of tinkering around I settled on a sensor node design consisting of a JeeNode with an AA battery based power supply, and a DS18B20 digital temperature sensor.

I now have four of these scattered around the flat, running a simple sketch that takes a sample from the temperature sensor every minute or so and transmits it back to my central server. The 878Mhz radio system seems to comfortably cover the entire building.

Using one JeeNode per sensor is not the cheapest way of doing this, but saves me pulling cable and leaves me with a lot of flexibility should I wish to expand this system or monitor additional parameters in future.

The end result: pretty graphs, and a better understanding of how the temperature in my flat changes over time.

Ideas that I have for the future include replacing the node near my server with a Arduino Nano, rather than using wireless to span half a metre, and reuse the JeeNode in another room.