I’m a big fan of small Single Board Computers like RaspberryPi or Pine64 boards. I think they are great example how cheap and powerful computing can be. Unfortunately there aren’t many usecases that most of the people can use them for. For most things, you can just run them on your own computer.
From what I’ve seen so far, most of the usecases are home server to store photos, videos and maybe host Plex server. Some kind of home automation. And pretty often also monitoring. I thought about automation for some time, but there isn’t that much I need to automate in my life. I tried to set it up as a home file server, but the network drive I bough is doing good job by itself. The only use I had for a lil board was PDF password cracking (forgotten password). I just let it run for weeks.
Once I saw Envirio+ by Pimoroni I was sold on monitoring. I also own few Oregon Scientific sensors that are connected to main module. They transmit on 433MHz.
And these are the areas that I want to focus. Measure outdoors and indoors weather conditions.
I will need 3 boards.
- Pi Zero for Envirio+
- Pi Zero for 433MHz decoding
- RockPro64 to collect data and generate statistics
For the software part Envirio+ is really easy. There are python examples that talks to the sensors. All thats left is to setup cronjob that gets values periodically and sends them to Trifle API.
Talking to Oregon sensors is more complex. I will need to decode and parse signals from the sensors. While there is again most code samples in python, they are usually limited and I will need to do some more conding there.
I’m planning to use Trifle API that I developed to collect data and create statistics over it. Hosted through Docker or K3s on a little Rockpro64 and crunching the data all the time. I’m not yet sure if I’ll be also serving the data from there or I’ll use some different board to display the data. There are some pretty impressive displays offered on Pimoroni. I’ll worry about that later.
For now I’ll be posting updates and notes about what I’ve learned while working on this.