Hi all,

I’m currently working on a home automation project that will do the following things:

• Monitor the grounds humidity for several plants and automatically water them if needed. Each plant/group of plants can be set to require a different amount of water.
• Measure the temperature in each room of the appartment
• Control the Central Heater (via the Remeha ISense interface)
• Control each separate heater, to control the heating in each room.
• All of this can be monitored and controlled via a web interface.

The (external) web interface will be run with Win10 IOT Core on a Raspberry Pi 2. While each internal sensor will be connected to an ESP8266. The latter shall communicate with the Pi over a WIFI connection.

For messing around with the ESP8266, I’ve got this ESP12E dev board.

I’ll update this blog with more info on how I’ve got everything setup as I’m working on it.

I’m still waiting for a few components to arrive before I can set this up completely.

So far, I’ve established:

1. Getting the ESP8266 to talk (and listen)
2. Reading the temperature with a DS18B20
3. Measuring the soils humidity
4. Exposing these readings as a webpage.

Some things to do within this project:

• Toggle a relay (from the web) to control the central heating, the individual heaters and the water valves.
• Setup the Pi as master for these ESP8266’s. It will be able to:
  • Expose a webinterface with logon
  • The ESP’s will identify themselves to the Pi
  • Display all the data.
  • (Through the webinterface) control each individual ESP.
  • (Later on) provide a more intelligent system. for example: when I request room X to be set to 21°C, it should manage the central heater and the individual heaters accordingly.
• Find out how to put the ESP’s in sleep mode for a few minutes, then wake up and check with the Pi to do their things.