New Adventures in WiFi

With a lot of smart home products coming on the market, and being discussed in my various news feeds, I was keen to start experimenting with some devices. There appeared to be a lack of products intended for the Australian market, and so after a bit of reading I learnt about Sonoff products manufactured by a company named  ITEAD  and purchased the following items. Sonoff S20 Smart Plug Sonoff RF Bridge Sonoff PIR2 Infrared Motion Detector My thinking was that I would use the S20 Smart Plug to experiment with some home automations, and use the RF Bridge and IR Motion Detector as the beginnings of a home security system. Configuration required installation of the eWeLink app by Sonoff. Unfortunately, when I sat down to start configuring the RF Bridge, I realised that potentially I was giving away more information through the app than I was willing to provide. My first pause point was the need to provide the password to my WiFi network. I also consi...

I'm now the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Zero W , and an official case . As a result of some changes to the Xively service I can no longer use it as an intermediate data conduit between the CurrentCost  web platform and PVOutput  for my electricity consumption and solar generation data (as described in this blog post ). So, I've needed to find an alternative, and my plan is to use the PVOutput Integration Service on the Pi. I've installed Raspbian  Stretch. Here is a pic of the Pi.

I'm going to write a few retrospective posts here about some of the beginnings of my smart home obsession. My first foray into the the world of home-smartening occurred at the time we installed solar panels on our house. At the same time, I purchased some CurrentCost EnviR  monitoring device (which can be seen below) to record the solar generation data, and also our household consumption data. The device comes with current clamps for the solar and mains wiring in the switchboard, and a couple of RF senders which send the signal to the display above. At the time I also bought a NetSmart hub which allowed the display to send data directly to the CurrentCost website, for viewing and monitoring. Unfortunately the CurrentCost website was poor for viewing the data, so I was able to pull the data from CurrentCost into a service called Cosm (previously called Pachube and later Xiveley) and then to PVOutput , which is an excellent service for viewing and monitoring el...