The problem I face is a $900 water bill for a home that I rent. The previous tenants left the home without power and caused the water pipes to freeze. As a landlord, I have no way of knowing this without physically visiting the home frequently. Once the temperatures rose above freezing the town's water started to pour in causing a utilization of 50,000G of water. I can't tie into the internet provided by the tenant (who wants a nosey landlord) so cellular monitoring seems to be a great solution. I'm sure others have faced similar or even worse circumstances.
What are you going to build to solve this problem? How is it different from existing solutions? Why is it useful?I am going to build a home monitoring hub prototype. It will utilize various sensors to help monitor and report several statistics related to home health such as: • Temperature and Humidity in the crawlspace relative to outside• Water flow meter to assess leaks and general utilization• Carbon Monoxide sensors for measuring levels and providing warnings to both me and the tenants • Air Quality sensor (This one is for checking if the filters are being changed.) I hope to use ML over time provide alerting around this.
How does your solution work? What are the main features? Please specify how you will use the Cellular IoT Starter Kit in your solution.My solution at a high level will work by polling each sensor, collecting and normalizing the data, and then sending the data over either Soracom's Harvest or through the AWS IoT connector into an Elasticsearch service. From there I can create dashboards and SNS topics for alerting based on sensor data. This will be a prototype but but the hub will have to provide robust and tamper-proof connections to each sensor and the sensors will have to be fault tolerant. Since I've built standalone sensors of each type that I'm looking to build I expect the bulk of the project to be around finding connecting solutions. One such thought is to generate a protected wifi network from a pi that would allow a wireless distribution of sensors to the hub and have the hub report over cellular. This is my stretch goal with the air quality and carbon monoxide sensors so they can be placed further away from the hub.
List the hardware and software you will use to build this.Most of this should be written in python since the hub is essentially a raspberry pi (I could see a transition to computing modules if this scales up) Triggered as a cron job on a certain interval. If I build standalone wifi connected sensors for a distributed network they would likely utilize Wemos D1's since they already have an 18650 battery compartment and an o-led to aid with pairing. Sensors would include: DHT-11 for temperature and humidity MQ7 for carbon monoxide detectionMQ-135 for air quality Hall effect based water flow sensor like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VKAT9VA/ for detecting water usage and to provide leak detection. Not in scope for this prototype but listed for future expansion:• Soil sensor for monitoring leaks in a crawlspace• MAF (Mass Air Flow) sensors for reporting duct flow • Water sensors for around toilets and bathtubs • Motion detection for security (Outbuildings that are not part of the tenant's lease) • Driveway beam/break sensors for vehicle sensing (is the tenant home?) I believe this idea can be scaled in a number of ways from hub distribution to sensor type. It really is a decoupled home monitoring solution. In the future, it may be even useful for just home and business owners. Right now I'm prototyping for my specific situation... Home health.
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