Author: Brendan Lester

Highlights Turns heater off and on Transmits heater status back to Gateway even when manually controlled Powered internally by Rinnai heater (model 557FTR) WARNING: This build works around high voltage, GAS(!!) and directly injects into your gas heater. My Company and I accept no liability whatsoever for anything. 557FTR Service Manual: http://manualzz.com/doc/1237654/rinnai-rhfe-557ftr-service-manual Rinnai Remote Thermostat product Rinnai sells a remote thermostat which plugs into their heaters: https://rinnai.co.nz/Download/ProductFile?encid=3LlAHF7kVaWaug8yiGgvnIfbR4-NmaiQPNZVLYHILBk~ https://www.rinnai-lms.com/resources/288/200000075-Remote%20Thermostat%20Installation%20Instructions.pdf All those modules do is connect two Red and Blue wires together on the units main PCB using a relay. The module provides separate…

An alternate approach to building a MySensors RGB Controller is to now purchase a WiFi RGB Controller. These are available in Bluetooth too, but proximity issues meant the WiFi works better for me. And they are available in RGBW. These little controllers are fantastic. Capable of supplying 144w – that’s over 15 meters of RGB. The results below are from some experimenting. Needless to say, I’ll be buying more of these instead of the DIY approach in the future.   Current Draw from 5m of RGB strip Documenting current draw on…

Highlights OTT kids room. Replace batteries in Minecraft lights with power from MySensors node (original reason for this mod,  so we don’t have to keep replacing/charging) Control off/on, brightness and random flicker effect Establish the start of a 12v power distribution point in the attic for additional nodes in the future. Drop from 12v to 5v/3.3v in the actual node. This way there’s no potential for voltage drop over distance to affect nodes.   /** * The MySensors Arduino library handles the wireless radio link and protocol * between your…

Highlights Powered by the alarms PIR No contact with the PIRs actual sense circuits, so no interruptions to the alarm functionality Replicates where I initially used an expensive Z-Wave Fibaro Universal Binary Sensor FGBS-001 / FGBS-321 I initially set out to replace the Z-Wave unit with a similar setup. I placed an optocoupler in series with the trip circuit and calculated the various resistances etc to replace one of the standard End Of Line / Tamper resistors. This worked, but I always felt a little funny about modifying a core security…

Highlights Standard MySensors Pulse Meter 3DU5 phototransistor detects meter pulses   WARNING: This build works around high voltage. My Company and I accept no liability whatsoever for your own well being or that of your electrical gear.     /** * The MySensors Arduino library handles the wireless radio link and protocol * between your home built sensors/actuators and HA controller of choice. * The sensors forms a self healing radio network with optional repeaters. Each * repeater and gateway builds a routing tables in EEPROM which keeps track of…

While the LIFX LED bulbs are not part of the MySensors network, they are still part of the Smart Home. LIFX bulbs connect directly to the Wi-Fi network and require no additional hardware. We use the LIFX application for additional effects, but keep simple, default lighting settings as quick actions in OpenHAB. The bulbs are allocated Static IP addresses and physically left on all of the time. They are controlled by OpenHAB with executed shell scripts. In our case, the lounge LIFX bulbs have been retrofitted into what was two…

Smart Home Our Smart Home primarily consists of scratch built, MySensors components and Google Home voice control. “MySensors is an open source hardware and software community focusing on do-it-yourself home automation and Internet of Things” I started off using a single Z-Wave binary component and USB stick, but realised it would be expensive to scale and still not do everything I wanted. MySensors components are build using cheap Arduino computers and standard electronic components. Time & effort is all that is required to piece things together. @Brendanl on MySensors Forum…