IoT, Smart Home and 3D Printing

Many projects have interesting insights in practice, which I would like to pass on here in the form of tips, recommendations and building descriptions. These pages are aimed at makers who also like to take a soldering iron, start the CNC milling machine or set up a server and write a few lines of code. They have something to do with my professional offers only in so far as they attach importance to appropriate security. Especially on security is unfortunately easily forgotten in the IoT and SmartHome area.

Smart Home

In the field of smart homes, many companies are trying to gain a foothold with different products. In practice, many things – especially with colorful lighting controls – are more of a gimmick than useful. It is more interesting for tasks in the field of heating control where considerable benefits can be created.

The automated and intelligent kitchen is still a gimmick at the moment. The trivial timer for morning coffee is still the best. The intelligent ice box, which keeps a book about the content and the associated expiration date and – coupled with the family calendar and eating habits – creates menu plans and shopping lists, is not yet practical. And even the classic light switch is not replaceable in practice by apps or the like. In the end, the roommates are quickly annoyed by the measure of all things and by technical gimmicks that only complicate life after the initial Wau factor.

In my Smart Home experiments, the following components remained practical (accepted and worn by all family members) and with benefits for all:

  • Heating control – solves (besides schedules for bathroom and apartment) the problem, which thermostat ultimately controls the boiler (has been in operation since 2007 with some upgrades).
  • Info panel at a central location for controlling temperatures in all rooms as well as some light installations, with heating data of the thermal baths, weather data, family appointments, CO2 concentration in all rooms, status and speed of internet connection, …
  • Light controls, which are partly coupled with the CO2 concentration in the room (e.g. showcase light). This is due to the corona crisis, as the CO2 concentration can be taken as a measure of aerosol pollution in the room and is thus called upon to ventilate the necessary airing.
  • Server (-room) monitoring

Projects

  • Blackout Lager – an app for intelligent inventory management during crisis situations.
  • CO2cloud – Messtation for CO2 concentration, standalone or integrated into smart home via MQTT
  • Raspberry Cluster
  • FHEM Instance – Smart Home Control with FHEM (in operation since 2007)
  • Heating control – via FHEM and currently with Homematic products
  • Pihole Instance – Security for home network
  • Floor lamps with light effects
  • Sensors for air pressure, humidity and/o temperature in the network
  • Reading data from all kinds of sensor stations
  • production of circuit boards by CNC milling
  • Family Archive with Nextcloud
  • Document archiving using AI