My Raspberry home network setup

-
This is the entire network that I have set up for my little project. Keep in mind that the idea is to have the two Raspi Zeros record the temperature and humidity inside and outside my house and send that data to the Raspberry Pi 3B+. The latter will decide if the outside air is cool and dry enough compared to the air inside the house. If yes, it will switch on a through the wall fan that pumps cool night air into my overheated tropical house - hopefully saving a bit of money on A/C! :-)


  • The Windows 10 workplace:
    • Runs the PyCharm IDE to develop, deploy and debug the Python code that runs on all the Raspberries;
    • Runs the MobaXTerm tool to remotely access all Raspberries via SSH.
  • The Raspberry Pi3B+ runs a Python code that:
    • receives sensor data messages from the two Raspberry Pi Zeros via MQTT (see future post);
    • analyzes the sensor data and switches the wall fan on and off;
    • sends the sensor data via a RESTful call to an awesome data visualization service called ThingSpeak.
  • The two Raspberry Pi Zero W's run identical Python code that:
    • reads temperature and humidity data via the I2C bus from their attached BME280 sensors;
    • and then sends that data via MQTT messages to the Raspberry Pi 3B+
  • All three Raspberries also do a fair amount of logging for informational or debugging purposes, they write that logging data to...:
  • the Network Attached Storage, which is a 2 TB WDMyCloud NAS device connected to the router via Ethernet.
  • Note: all three Raspberries communicate exclusively via WiFi/router with the Windows 10 workplace and each other.

One of the Raspberry Pi Zero W's sits in my living room, recording the temperature and humidity there. The other Pi Zero W is mounted outside on the porch, to read the temperature and humidity there. Both are within reach of my WiFi router, obviously. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has no sensors attached, it acts as a communications hub, so it can be located anywhere as long as it's within reach of the router's WiFi signal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accessing a NAS drive from your Raspberry Pi

-
Image
Often enough, you will need much more storage space than is available on your Raspberry's SD Card. With a few setup files in the Raspbian OS, writing to and reading from a NAS drive in your home network is possible. The following works for Raspbian Stretch. It is a bit finnicky to set up, and very parameter dependent, so it may or may not work for other Raspbian versions. When finished, you will have a new folder (here, named as 'WDMyCloud') in your Raspberry's directory structure. It will behave like a local folder on the Raspi's SD card, but it is actually a folder on the NAS drive. Step 1: Create a folder on the Pi that you will later mount the NAS share in. That folder needs to be somewhere in the home/pi structure. I have put that folder in the /home/pi/ directory and simply named it after my NAS which, you guessed it, is a WDMyCloud device. In a Raspberry terminal window, create that folder with the following commands: cd /home/pi  sudo mkdir DRIVE...
Read more

Why yet another Raspberry Pi blog?

-
There's tons of excellent blogs, YouTube videos, websites and other stuff out there, on absolutely everything you can do with a Raspi. Written by people who are light years ahead of me in programming, networking, Linux wizardry, electronics etcetera. So what am I trying to accomplish here? What value could I possibly add to that tremendous intelligence that is already freely available? Here's what. If you're like me, you have become interested in just playing with these wonderful little things and want to know how they work, and what you could do with them. They are a solution looking for a problem. So you are looking around your house, thinking: "What on earth could I possibly automate around here?" So you contemplate building a surveillance camera system. Or a smart energy meter. Or a weather station. Or automating your aquarium. Whatever. In my case, i thought I'd start with adding some cheap temperature and humidity sensors, and if that works, I coul...
Read more

Remotely control your Raspberry Pi Zero W from your Windows computer with SSH

-
Image
So you've got your Raspberry Pi Zero W all set up, with Raspbian Stretch installed and working, and you've got a keyboard plugged into it. And you can see and operate the Raspi's GUI via the screen that you have plugged into the Raspi's HDMI port. Good! I like to remove screens, cables and stuff from my desk as much as possible. And I want to put the Raspi into a little box anyway, for some home automation purposes, and that box will be meters away from my office desk. Luckily, the Raspberry Pis allow to be completely remote control with a Windows computer via 'SSH' networking. The following is my recipe to set up SSH remote control on your Raspberry and your Windows computer. Step 1: by default, SSH is disabled on a brand new Raspi. We need to enable SSH. From the GUI, select Preferences-Raspberry Pi Configuration: In the Configuration window, enable 'SSH': Reboot the Raspi to start the SSH functionality. Done. The Raspi is now ready to be ...
Read more