Good day folks. Summer being in full swing, I thought I'd automate my home a bit and come up with a way of putting the air con on even before I arrive home. It does have a time delay feature that goes up to 2h, so you can set it to turn on/off after 2h, but that's the maximum range you get, so if I'm gone for more than 2h, it's a waste of energy if comes on and cools nothing, plus once it IS on, you have no way of telling it to turn off again so it just keeps on going.
Of course there are probably many projects out there describing what I want, but trying to keep the component count and budget to a minimum, I'm not sure what I should use exactly. I have an Arduino Mega on hand, but from what I understand that's not enough. Not counting its obvious lack of any network features without a shield, I learned it's not fast enough to handle both the remote codes and the network environment at the same time. Most home automation projects seem to revolve around the Raspberry pi of some sort and I was thinking of getting one of those and giving it a crack, despite not having worked with one ever before.
I DID see them in action and had a brief look into it when my workmate automated the lights in his house and even designed some sort of remote desktop client/server thingy with one (to this day I'm not sure what all that mess was trying to achieve that a PC couldn't, but anyway). He tried "luring" me into all this home-automation business, but I didn't really play along since I regard it as a waste of time and especially money, especially for small apartments (why would you need to turn a light on if you're not at home?), but the A/C is one thing you WOULD want to control remotely and I'd like such feature, so perhaps it will be a good learning experience after all. What do you guys think ? Any thoughts or good resources on this ? What should I look into ? Hell, maybe someone's already done this and can provide some direct feedback. Cheers and thanks.
Of course there are probably many projects out there describing what I want, but trying to keep the component count and budget to a minimum, I'm not sure what I should use exactly. I have an Arduino Mega on hand, but from what I understand that's not enough. Not counting its obvious lack of any network features without a shield, I learned it's not fast enough to handle both the remote codes and the network environment at the same time. Most home automation projects seem to revolve around the Raspberry pi of some sort and I was thinking of getting one of those and giving it a crack, despite not having worked with one ever before.
I DID see them in action and had a brief look into it when my workmate automated the lights in his house and even designed some sort of remote desktop client/server thingy with one (to this day I'm not sure what all that mess was trying to achieve that a PC couldn't, but anyway). He tried "luring" me into all this home-automation business, but I didn't really play along since I regard it as a waste of time and especially money, especially for small apartments (why would you need to turn a light on if you're not at home?), but the A/C is one thing you WOULD want to control remotely and I'd like such feature, so perhaps it will be a good learning experience after all. What do you guys think ? Any thoughts or good resources on this ? What should I look into ? Hell, maybe someone's already done this and can provide some direct feedback. Cheers and thanks.
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