A while ago I put together the Arnest , which was a nice simple alternative to other smart thermostat systems that was compatible with the old wiring in my apartment. It worked, but I couldn't keep track of the temperature at more than one point in the apartment. I was also interested to see what other atmospheric data could be collected by a network of sensors. mostly because graphs are cool.
This project is the next step - moving from a single unit that does temp readings and then controls the heater relay to a multi-point system that reads various data and communicates them to a base station, which aggregates and sends the information to a server that stores the readings and acts as control.
To that end, there are four subrepos of Ernest:
- Slave Node Schematics. The 'slave' nodes are the data collectors, equipped with temperature, barometric pressure and humidity sensors as well as a 2.4GHz radio transciever for communicating with the base station. I've tried to make these relatively inexpensive to build, since you will most likely want a couple of them.
- Slave Node Code. The control program for the slave nodes in Arduino code. The original version of the slave node used an entire Arduino Micro, but to reduce cost rev4 uses a bare ATMEGA328-P. The tip of these two repos may not be in sync, so be sure to check pin definitions when building this yourself.
- Master Node Schematics. The data aggregator and controller. Communicates with the server over http, controls the furnace, displays a nice interface.
- Master Node Code. The master node simply listens for data on the radio and posts it to a managing server. There's no integrated schematic for this yet, but it's simple enough to construct one out of an arduino.
- Server Code. The server interacts with the master node, tracking the collected data and making the decision of whether or not the master node should activate the furnace.
