REDELIJKHEID
In my previous blogpost, the Sonoff worked, but was lacking a manual override. The switch could only be triggered by Domoticz. Since it also has a physical push button (connected to GPIO0 (D3)), it can be switched by hand. All that needs to be done is:
The Sonoff TH16 is an inexpensive piece of hardware that can be controlled over WiFi. Apart from the switch (that's capable of handling electrical currents up to 16A) there's an interface for temperature and humidity. The actual temp/humid sensor is sold separately (in most cases).
NGINX (pronounced as engine-x) is a versatile (reverse) proxy service for Linux which can be used for many purposes. This post gives a relative small and easy example that I use at home for accessing insecure web services in my home. These are:
These services run on different platforms and are not protected by username/password or encryption. Something that's not done if you want to access this over the Internet.
To get secure access to these services you might want to use a VPN solution into your home, but you can also achieve this by using a reverse proxy that 'protects' these services.
I run my NGINX reverse proxy on Ubuntu Linux, but it will also run on the average Raspberry Pi.
The first steps with domotica have been made over here. We now have an overview of our electricity and gas usage by using a smart-meter with solar-panels and a Raspberry Pi with Domoticz software.
The image below indicates that the solar panels are delivering 558W at that moment and the smart-meter reports that it's delivering to the net (139W). So we were self sustaining at that moment.
Actual electricity and gas usage
Some statistics over the last couple of days indicate that we produce more electricity than we consume. Don't think that those graphs look anything like this during the winter though :-)
The green columns are topping the blue, so we're making 'money' on those days. And that 'money' will most likely be consumed during the winter period, when solar output is much less.
Electricity consumption during the week where green is good :-)
I'll make a more extensive post about the set-up in due time, but for now, these are the things I used:
Total cost: ~75 euros (Raspberry Pi 2B starter kit + Smart meter cable), and a crap-load of time (experimenting, research, etc.).
Next steps are adding z-wave functionality to the set-up for more monitoring enhancements.