Most complicated home network ever…ever.

A little background:

I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about 12, when I got my own laptop and desktop both from garage sales and began swapping parts, doing OS upgrades from floppy disks and doing whatever I could to tinker with them. Fast forward almost two decades, and I’m still at but on a much larger scale.

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Arduino Wireless Logging, Post Four: The Graphs

When I got all this data logged and running, I wanted an easier way to show data than spreadsheets or queries. The end goal was actual graphs to show trends and what not. Introducing “phpgraphlib”. This is an open source piece of code built to implement charts/graphs into webpages with ease. This took a bit of work, but here’s the idea behind it:

  • Be able to load a web page and show trends/data
  • Pull this information on demand from a database

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Arduino Wireless Logging, Post Three: Mysql, PHP, and a little networking

Here’s where things started to get a little more complex. At this point, I have a wireless system to transmit data from multiple nodes to a central hub (node0) which collects and shows the data via serial connection.

The general idea/goal is this:

  • Arduino Nodes send data to central node
  • Central node is connected to home network and sends this data to a LAMP server (Linux-Apache-Mysql-PHP)
  • The server takes this data, breaks it into a mysql statement, and pushes it into the database to log

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Arduino Wireless Logging, Post Two: The Design

This is the second part of the series for my Arduino wireless project I’ve been working on for a couple weeks now. You can start reading from the first post: https://aasullivan.com/?p=1146.

We have the idea, now we have to build it. I have three Arduinos set up at this point in this manner:

  • (1) Set up as wireless receiver/hub; this will read data, print to Serial and log to ethernet eventually
  • (2) Transmitters which simply read data every ~5 seconds to blindly send to receiver (node 0)

This layout will allow me to test from a couple devices to make sure the layout of the node IDs will work properly and be read properly as well. I ran into my first set of issues at this point: I can only read one Arduino at a time off Serial from the IDE, so went and imaged an older Dell D630 to handle the receiving end of things to troubleshoot the payload issues I ran into.  Continue reading “Arduino Wireless Logging, Post Two: The Design”

Arduino Wireless Logging, Post One: The Idea

I’ve had a number Arduino systems for some time now along with a large number of RF24 wireless modules and DHT11 humidity/temperature sensors. The idea I’ve had for some time is this:

  1. Arduino with a DHT11 sensor and RF24 wireless device pull then transmit data.
  2. Data goes to secondary hub/master Arduino using an RF24 module along with an Ethernet adapter (Wiznet 5100)
  3. This master hub then pushes the data to a web server containing a mysql database to log and store the information

Simple right? Wrong.

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Arduino Home Monitoring

Lately I’ve been engrossed in a project to add some monitoring to my home. This includes temperature and humidity readings, along with monitoring for windows and doors eventually. This will be built almost entirely using Arduinos wherever possible.

The Goal:
To have a remotely viewable home dashboard to monitoring the house

The Plan:
Use Arduinos and cheap parts from Amazon to build this and code myself

At this point, I’ve built some of the systems but greatly need to expand upon this. More updates to (hopefully) come!

Latest Computer build: RAID fileserver and media center

Had the idea in my head for a while now about doing a fileserver build to put all my media in one place. This includes years of movies, music and TV shows along with about 100GB of music rips. The goals of this were pretty simple:

  • Have some form of redundancy, most likely in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 format
  • Have enough horsepower to stream movies/videos on the fly, including conversions
  • Have enough storage for all my current collection (~1.5TB) and future

At this point, I had some extra components lying around and got a sweet deal on an ASUS 990X motherboard and a set of 6 hard drives. Let’s get to the specs:

  • ASUS 990X Sabertooth motherboard
  • Corsaid 500W PSU
  • Mushkin 240GB SSD
  • (6) 750GB WD Black hard drives
  • AMD 3.5GHz 8-Core CPU
  • Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler
  • AMD 7770 GPU card with 2GB GDDR5 RAM
  • Rosewill Stealth tower
  • (2) Inline SATA power cords
  • (6) 90 Degree SATA cables

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