Monthly Archives: July 2015

Electronics, Gadgets, Home Automation, Networking

Quick look VoCore

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Had a package arrive the other month with my VoCore which was a project I baked on Indiegogo a while back.

The VoCore is a tiny computer running OpenWRT with a 360mhz processor and 32MB of RAM and 16MB of flash with built in Wi-Fi, two 100mbs network cards, USB and 28 GPIO ports.

Perfect for projects that have limited room or that require WiFi.

I knew the board was small but really didn’t think it would be as small as it is, here it is next to a USB stick:

DSC_0854

The size (and my soldering skills) made soldering connectors onto the board quite a challenge.

They do make a dock for it which breaks out the USB and Ethernet connectors but pretty  much doubles the price of the unit.

Initial configuration is done over serial with the provided USB-TTL converter but first power and serial lines have to be soldered on.

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As you can see my soldering skills aren’t the best on these small pitch connectors I will have to redo them before I use the unit in a permanent installation.

DSC_0861

After firing the unit up and connection via serial I reconfigured the wireless to operate in client mode and connect to my home Wi-Fi and was then able to connect via SSH:

vocore-login

My intention is to use this board with a USB Relay board to operate my garage door as well as other projects out the front of the house, this saves having to get a cable from the house into the garage which would be a nightmare.

Future projects may also include Wi-Fi connected appliances such as washing machine, dryer, kettle and the likes due to the small size, GPIO pins and cheap price.

Arduino, Electronics, Home Automation, Raspberry Pi

Update 1-7-2015

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Bit of an update, I’ve done more work on the back end and data collection and have ordered parts to begin a outdoor sensor array to compliment the weather station.

First upgrade was to my NAS which runs unRAID which previously had VirtualBox running on top of it to run the Webserver and Windows 7 VM for the home automation. The new version of unRAID includes the KVM visualization solution.

After updating unRAID and converting the VirtualBox images over everything was back up and running all with a nice web interface:

unraidvm

 

This allows for much easier control of the VM’s as well as start/shutdown with the NAS.

Two new data sources have been added to the system the first being the data from my front door RFID system which unfortunately doesn’t have a direct interface with mysql (it uses access) so I found a program that pulls data from msaccess into mysql here which I configured to poll every hour and insert into mysql.

This has been added to the web interface which now shows the Doorbell as well as the RFID data:

doors

Clicking into RFID gives the last 20 entries/exits allowing a quick view of who has been home over the last few days.

The second data source is CPU temperature from the Doorbell Raspberry Pi which was mostly out of curiosity but also to see how the Raspberry Pi was holding up to living outside.

I used a Python script to poll the data every 5 minutes and insert it into mysql, you can download the script here.

Below is a graph of the Pi temperature over a 24 hour period:

doorbellpigraph

And the added page for the sensor:

doorbellpi

Few changes to the internal web interface to show number of records for each sensor as well as min/max/avg of both temperature and humidity from each sensor:

tempreadings

minmaxavg

Mostly minor changes but gives a bit more info on everything.

 

I’ve ordered parts to build a outdoor sensor array which will be based off an Arduino with Ethernet shield and the following sensors:

DHT22 – Temperature and humidity

MQ-9 – Carbon Monoxide and Combustible gas sensor

BMP180 – Barometric pressure

ML8511 – UV level sensor

I may add a few other air quality sensors as well over time, this will be added to the data from the weather station and uRAD monitor data to give a good overview of outside conditions.