My project idea for the Eclipse Open IoT Challenge

My idea for the Eclipse Open IoT Challenge came from my need to measure the humidity in my rooms, to track it and also control air humidifiers based on the humidity. I used some humidifier control plugs, but they were just not smart enough. Since I like electronic tinkering and have some interrest in IoT, why not build a DIY solution. For the Eclipse Open IoT Challenge this transformed into the more generic idea to build a maker friendly DIY IoT home automation solution.

Overview

The plan is to create Arduino based sensor and actor nodes that use MQTT-SN to communicate over a nRF24L01+ based wireless sensor area network. They send and receive their messages via a MQTT-SN gateway to a MQTT broker. The gateway and the broker run on a Raspberry Pi gateway node. Also on the Raspberry Pi runs an instance of Node-RED which is connected to the MQTT broker and is used to wire the things and make them smart. Node-RED will also be used to forward the sensor data to cloud services like ThingSpeak or Xively to store, analyse and present the data.

Outlook

We got new snow today

so IoT had to wait for the evening and the details of

• the wireless sensor area network
• the sensor and actor nodes
• the gateway
• the used software stacks
• the hardware details
• …

have to wait for the next post.