About this project
This is an open source system for integrating wireless Arduino sensors to an awesome home automation platform called OpenHAB. It allows you to get email notifications and audio alarming based on sensor data. The OpenHAB platform provides the mobile app server, browser based interface, actions (emails, Android/Apple push notification services), and rules engine needed to do real home automation.
This first demonstration videos shows a long battery life Arduino reed switch sensor integrated with OpenHAB's dashboard interface. It also uses the email feature and audio alarming feature.
This second demonstration video shows how much functionality and flexibility can be packed into a single Arduino sensor. This one monitors
1) smoke & combustible gas
2) motion
3) fire
4) sound (dog bark)
5) light level
6) temperature & humidity
This last example will be different from all the other sensor projects so far. I’ve been kicking around this dog tracker idea for a while. Recently, there was an “Internet of Things Hack Day” competition held by the local Arduino group here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota, USA). I took this opportunity to form a team to work on this dog tracker idea. This is what my teammates (Wolf Loescher, Russ Terrell, and Patrick Delaney) and I managed to make on competition day.
I’m presenting this idea mainly to highlight how flexible Arduino and DIY automation can be. You can make your own niche sensor. The prototype we made is fully functional, but the electronics needs to be shrunk down in order for it to be worn on the dog. I hope to keep working on it when I have more time. For now, I’ll just post the code and video demo without the fancy wiring diagram found in previous steps. You can pretty much figure out the wiring diagram from the Arduino sketch, so I hope that’s ok.
Motivation
Lots of people let their dog out to poop in the morning. It’s tempting to just let them out the yard by themselves and give them time to sniff around while you stay warm and cozy inside and finish your coffee. But there’s two problems with that.
- The dog might run away (if you don’t have a fenced yard).
- You don’t know if they poop, or where they poop, and end up spending more time looking for the poop. Neglecting to pick up the poop is NOT an option!
This dog wearables project aims to solve these problems. As seen in the diagram, the idea is to have a dog wear a collar box. The collar box contains a GPS module, tilt switch, and a RFM69 transceiver.
Dog Escape Alarm and Tracking
The GPS location is constantly being sent from the dog unit to the OpenHAB Raspberry Pi at home, via the same gateway previously detailed. The moment the GPS signal strays beyond a virtual boundary defined in OpenHAB, the Raspberry Pi speakers play an audible alarm to alert the dog owner they need to go out and fetch the dog. The owner can look at the OpenHAB screen to see a google map of where their dog currently is (or at least the last GPS signal received). Armed with the initial direction the dog went, he can then use a handheld unit to locate the dog outside. With the great range of the RFM69, the system should be able to locate the dog more than 900 feet away with the hand-held unit, or 700 feet with building obstruction. The range is good enough to be very helpful when locating a lost dog, even if you have no clue where it might have gone. You can drive around waiting for a ping from the handheld unit.
For more detail: Uber Home Automation
