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Comment by cstuder | Hacker News Reader

This sounds uncomfortably familiar. I started out wanting to measure my room temperature and log it into a database. Three years later and you're soldering ESP8266s.

A lot of fun and I've picked up plenty of skills among the way all over the stack: Automated setup of Rasbperry Pis, Docker, Let's Encrypt, IP forwarding and NAT transversals, sniffing traffic from iOS Apps, developing Python modules for HA, hosting time series databases, accessing them from Junyper notebooks, programming ESPs, basic electronics, soldering your own sensor packages...

I really love Home Assistant as a powerful Open Source project, but the knowhow required to successfully run it is staggering.

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> Three years later and you're soldering ESP8266s

I've just shut down my environmental monitoring solution. I had 7 of those things reporting temperature and humidity (along with various other readings if needed) over Mosquitto MQTT.

I put my initial solution together in 2013, and i shut everything down this year. Turns out i rarely looked at the data i collected, and never used historical data, so a regular digital thermometer with a LCD display is more than enough for me :)

By the time of shutting down, the thing had grown to include push notifications of temperature extremes for select sensors, as well as presence detection along with humidity alerts for getting people to open windows every now and then, and another notification if the temperature dropped fast (2-3C or more over 20 mins)(so they close the windows again)

These days i just open windows every day, and as for the temperature, if it's too hot/cold i adjust the thermostat. The one remaining issue is the temperature in my dog kennel, which was the original reason for implementing it, but as it has never been a problem in the 7 years it was running, i figure i won't be a problem ever.

I like stories like that (experienced this myself). Building complex system, because it scratches an itch, and not using it after completion. So what happened witch the itch, where is it. What was it all about? Why did it happen? Why this kind of system and not the other, etc. This kind if questioning. Was that because the dog was the only part of the environment, that was alive / uncontrollable?

> Was that because the dog was the only part of the environment, that was alive / uncontrollable

When i got my current dog i built an outdoor dog kennel (12m2) for it. My previous dog lived inside in a temperature controlled environment, so i never wondered if it would get too hot or too cold. It did however destroy most of our stuff when it was alone.

Living in Scandinavia, temperatures can vary from +35C to -18C during the year, and while most of the range is "ok" (27C - -8C), the extremes was the reason for building it in the first place.

Had the dog been living outside all the time this wouldn't have been a problem, but when confined to a (relatively) small space, and living indoors for half it's day means that in the summer it cannot move to a better/cooler place, and in the winter it may not have a thick enough winter coat.

It has an insulated dog house there, approved for all year usage for guard dogs, and unlike my previous dog, this one actually uses it - though mostly when it rains.

> So what happened witch the itch, where is it. What was it all about?

Sometimes it's just art and craft. Kind of like people making tools / knifes. There's a pleasure in making something even if it's not really going to be used.

> So what happened witch the itch, where is it. What was it all about?

Sometimes the itch is "I like the challenge of finding/building a solution for X" not "I need a solution for X".

Different from home automation, but sometimes I find myself carried away researching "the best photo printer", "the nicest hybrid smart watch", "the best value tiny PC I can mount on a monitor" or some other gadget. I browse around the reviews, youtube videos, shopping sites, and find the best product for the best price. And then ... I move on because, realistically, I don't need the thing.

> the nicest hybrid smart watch

There’s a very nice one on Kickstarter right now. Ad Maiora.

... and the quest continues :-)

It does look nice in the renders. If the smart features are also powered by the self-winding mechanism, that's a game changer. It's quite pricey though.

I currently have a Kronaby Apex on my wrist. A few years old model, but I quite like the legible watch face, the 2 year battery life, and the absence of anything giving away it has smart features.

I call this "the permaresearch queue". Stuff that just becomes perpetually research, and you get more out of doing the research than doing the thing. For me right now is learning how to build a shed. I have a feeling it could also be called "procrastiresearch" too!

This is basically happening for me now. Bought a house and a ton of gadgets to tinker with, with a dream of having the ultimate smart home.

Heavily underestimated the time sink it is and how often things break. But it definitely scratches and itch.

I’ve learned so much about circuit boards, electricity, and soldering in the past few weeks I think it’s well worth it, even if the smart home dream itself might never materialize.

Have you had trouble with time zones and timestamps Distributed Raspberry PIs that had to connect to a device via Bluetooth Low Energy, and send data through a 4G dongle, and do updates, reboots, etc. completely unattended.

I had nightmares about time zones.

No, but I've only had one server running.

How do you graph your measprements?

Currently I'm using the InfluxDB integration to send selected sensor data to an InfluxDB V1 instance. Graphing is done in Grafana, all outside of Home Assistant itself.

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