Whether my kids or myself are to blame, it drives me crazy to see large electricity bills from cooling and heating the house when nobody’s actually in the house.
Looking for a solution to the problem and driven by “stream” technology, I decided to build my own smart home IoT system to collect and monitor temperature, humidity, and motion in my house. As a platform, I chose the Arduino Uno board, and in less than a few days, I had a running system to collect the sensor data and visualize it in realtime.
However, visualizing the data was not enough. I needed a system that would track the data, understand normal patterns, and notify me when abnormal patterns emerged. For example, if there was no motion in the room, but the A/C was left on, the temperature and humidity would drop abnormally.
A common problem that pushes any Arduino&co fan to think making his own home automation system, sooner or later. But how to solve those issues raised above?
To solve this problem, I built on top of my existing IoT system and implemented two additional services:
- PubNub: a realtime data stream network to stream sensor data
- Anodot: a smart platform to collect and automatically analyze data and alert when abnormal patterns are detected
