I’ve been reading iot related projects for a while. It started with building a 3d printer with pc leftovers. Now I want to do different things but mostly automation. Such as
- Watering plants when the soil is dry,
- Starting the air conditioner when I left the office,
- Keeping the room temperature and moisture stable,
- Opening the blinds when sun rises,
- Motion detection triggered buzzer and camera,
- Being able to monitor and control all of these wireless,
- Being able to power/charge all sensor batteries with solar or grid when solar is not possible,
- In summary we can call these as smart home applications.
I want to do these stuff so I must buy something for it. I did it many times. I also bought Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi One, Pine64, Odroid C2 and of course lots of Arduino Uno’s and Nano’s. I just back [Onion Omega 2 too.
After all these buying but not doing anything with them stuff confused me. Now I’m thinking I am doing it all wrong. Onion team helped(reminded) me to understand that I know nothing about microcontrollers and electronics. Some stuff I bought can work with only digital sensors and other only analog. Some boards consume more current and not proper choices to work with.
Take your Arduino Nano or the smallest one you have. Write a program to turn an LED on at 5:05 PM and back off at 8:30AM (or whenever you leave for work). Use timing loops to figure out days, hours, minutes, etc…
Pretend the LED is the air conditioner.
Now add a relay driver board and a BFR (Big Friendly Relay ) to your Arduino. Now it can actually control a real A/C unit.
Next, add an Arduino Real time clock to the assembly and get the time from that instead of using timing loops which will drift over time. You’ll also need to be able to set the clock and the on and off times. That needs a display and a few pushbuttons. Now you have more features to add and at each stage you have something usable.
You get the point: start small and add features, learning as you go.
I designed control software for very complex medical devices for over a decade. You can bet I didn’t start out “just knowing how” to do that.
Thank you lyndon. That was a great answer. I will follow your suggestion.
One question though. Arduino boards are really limited by their memory. This Omega 2 board looks great but i am not sure if it is a proper chioce for the path you suggest. I dont want to buy any additional dock for this board and it can only work with digital sensors which are much more expensive than analog sensors.
This is the place I am confused. Should I buy Omega boards?
Thank you again lyndon. The reason why I was worried about memory is the IR management. [In this project(which I exactly want to do) the owner of the project tells that Arduino Uno is not enough because of the memory limit but Arduino Mega is. But I don’t want to use big space consuming boards. This is why I was looking for new boards.
Odroid, Orange Pi and Pine64 consumes more energy than it can be accepted in projects like I want to do. This is why I am looking for boards like Raspberry Pi Zero or Omega 2. Raspberry Pi is really hard to get so I wonder if Omega is ok.
The other side of the board choice is I have to use digital sensors which I don’t have but have lots of analog ones. I bought all the sensors together from Aliexpress because if I try to do something new I have to wait more than a month to receive the necessary parts since all the parts are really expensive here in my country(sometimes 10 times).
) to your Arduino. Now it can actually control a real A/C unit.