I've been working on a couple coding projects around the house.

Last year at this time I had a green house project going. It was mostly to learn how to build IOT devices and deploy them. I also wanted to create a gui/display. My long-term goal was to replace my store bought weather center with a home made weather center.

What did I learn?

• Store bought items have pretty decent GUIs. It's easy to criticize them, but difficult to make a better one from scratch.
• Store bought electronics are much better optimized, and smaller than anything I can create.
• One starts to feel like an idiot when looking to replace a sleek looking, 2x*2"x5" temperature/humidity gauge with a 5"x5"x2" monstrosity boxed in old tuperware.
• I can't recall the last time I replaced the single AA battery powering the outdoor sensor.

After taking the seed garden apart ¹, I used the esp8266s to build some sensors to put up outside and around the house. I also picked up a raspberry pi to run its own indoor sensor and to host sensor related stuff. It came with Node-Red. Node red makes building a GUI easy. I chose to use MQTT to deliver information across the network and Node-red easily deals with MQTT. My favorite thing about Node-Red so far is that it's easy to come back to a project and figure out what it is doing and how it is doing it.

This year, we've decided to find a better place to grow tomatoes in the yard. Last year, we didn't see a good yield from our beef stake tomatoes. I built a couple light sensors with the ESP8266 modules.But, I needed to use batteries to power them instead of plugging them in. It's forced me to learn how to switch the device into low power mode as well as trouble shoot a few issues where I was losing power. I tested one in house for a couple days and it seems to have done well on battery. I just deployed to units out into the backyard. They're farther from the router and it's taking them longer to connect and transmit data. I'm wondering how much it will effect their battery life.

If the battery life is too short, I have another plan. Currently, they're connecting to the network after every reading. If I have to rework the code, I'll have them upload after an hour or two, possibly daily.

Next Steps

• I'm thinking about adding a 3rd sensor to sit closer to the center of my yard to act as a control group.
• Adding notifications from node-red in case the sensor loses contact for more than an hour.
• Adding a connection to my website so I can check when I'm away from the house (my pi is only configured locally)