MeteoHome Kicad design

During this summer vacation, I dedicated my time to upgrading my home automation server running Home Assistant. I swapped out my trusty SolidRun Cubox-i for a new Beelink mini PC. As I got more involved, I found myself diving back into the development of MeteoHome, making changes, and brewing up new ideas to enhance it.

But, what is MeteoHome, you might ask? Well, it’s a DIY programming project I started way back in 2016. It’s essentially a weather station that uses an ESP8266 devboard and DHT22 and BMP180 sensors. What sets it apart from similar projects is its straightforward configuration through a captive web portal. It also uses MQTT to send data to a server and is designed to have all this data collected by Home Assistant. This means you can easily check the current sensor status and historical graphs.

Co2 Detector

After reading this article (ES) I started to think about creating my own sensor board. I searched which sensor to use and the SGP30 seemed a good option to me. Then, I did a few tests, I modified the code of another project and then I designed a PCB and later on I  built two prototypes which are currently working in my house. The device uses a mqtt queue to send data to an IoT gateway (a minipc running Home Assistant in my case). In addition to that, there are three LEDs to show what is the current state of the air based on CO2 PPMs:

  • Green light is shown if there are less than 600 PPM of CO2.
  • Yellow light if there are between 600 and 800 PPM.
  • Red when the CO2 is greater than 800.

The source code and the PCB design (made in Kicad) can be found here. In January, the project was certified by as open source hardware by the OSHWA

The Power Progress Community non profit association is trying to fund a new notebook based on a NXP T208x processor. This organization is accepting donations with the objective of collecting funds to establish a contract with Acube Systems to design the laptop's motherboard. The campaign started last Friday reached a 10% of its goal in 24h.

The objective is not only to build a notebook but to promote the use of Power technologies for home computing as well. We want to create an open computer and certify it as Open Source Hardware if possible. We are commited to distribute all the work performed in the scope of the project as open source, publishing documentation, designs etc.

The circuit in a breadboard

This is a quick example of how to use websockets in an ESP8266 device. I wanted to experiment with websockets and this was a simple way to do it. The device runs the websocket server and its code is very similar to what you can find in this example. On the other side, the client is a Qt (QML) application. I think QML is an easy way of developing applications and the advantage is that you can use the same code in a smartphone or a desktop PC. If you prefer, before reading this article you can find the source code repository here.

Requirements

  • This source uses Arduino IDE and its standard libraries
  • Additional libraries: arduinoWebsocket
  • QT creator IDE for the client application
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