ESP8266 Community Forum

User
arduolli

Description
“DIY: An open source wireless system that monitors gas consumption of home heating (via local server and over the internet) for under 10$ –
Cheap, Safe, Simple & Reliable!”

I did not do programming since (long gone…) school days and even then it was only the simplest BASIC programming. The Arduino movement brought back my curiosity and I am tinkering around with Unos, Minis and Nanos since roughly a year – I am thrilled about the ease of use (simplicity of programming) and the supportive community.
(My 1st Arduino project was an automatic garden watering system. The setup was basically working, but in the end I was not able to build a reliable moisture sensor: I tried tons of different resistive and capacitive sensors, but none gave me long-term consistent(!) readings, although I even took other parameters like temperature into account – but that’s a different story…)
Then, 3 months ago I heard about the ESP8266 – I was blown away by the new possibilities: programmable via Arduino IDE, WLAN capability, ~10x performance over a std. Arduino – all that for ~2€! And again a super friendly, active and supportive community.
I ordered some and thought about what to do with them:
The new big thing seems to be ‘home automation’ and while I don’t want to automate my home (I still like physical switches for lamps etc. and I don’t need a fridge that knows when I am out of milk….), I do like the idea of monitoring my energy consumption. Further down the road, I want to do correlations of the consumption to outside temperature (i.e. impact of our passive solar system to gas consumption) and also understand how heat propagates through our house when heating is on.

See attachments for more information.

Parts

See attachments for more information.

Links
Thingspeak

Video

Images

See attachments for more information.

Hi;
I need to take the ESP offline today (Friday) - but when I put it back online later today, it will include tracking of outside temperature (beside tracking our gas consumption). Both temperature and gasconsumption will be tracked by one ESP01. Great little device.
arduolli


Update:
System is running again; see thingspeak channel:
https://thingspeak.com/channels/91336 (I needed to reset the gas m3 count, therefor above snapshot of prior data)

Both thingspeak and lokal file contain now gas consumption and (outside) temperature & humidity.

Gas-consumption reed switch is on GPIO2 and DHT11 is feeding into GPIO0. (GPIO0 can be used as input / output on ESP01; it only needs to be shorted to Ground during programming of the device)

Program is structured such that no gas count should be missed while doing DHT readout & upload.
Also, fixed a bug, where thingspeak upload was interrupted when local TCP server was not running. Now these 2 uploads work independent from another.

Attatched pls find updated program (*.ino) file and updated circuit diagram (jpg)

Just a heads up:
I am updating the system to add electrical energy monitor - and I am rewriting the code.

Previous status was that ESP01 (plus reedswitch plus DHT11) monitor gas consumption and outside temperature & humidity.
Currently, I am adding an Arduino pro mini reading our electricity meter via IR reflection (and feeding the readout to the ESP01).
This entire thing will still be around/under $10!

Also, I am rewriting the code, so that gas and electricity measurements are done in 2 interrupt loops, so I am not missing any data.

Everything is still fed to a local server and to thingspeak.

When it is up and running I will post the updated code etc.
(This means unforunately also, that I will reset all data at thingspeak)
Arduolli

UPDATE:
Unfortunately, adding electrical energy monitoring takes longer than expected.
This is mainly due to the fact that the new system is not stable: I think it is due to the fact that I am now running long (2-3meters) cables from the detectors (reed switch, additional arduino) to the ESP.
Now I get occasional 'noise' readings, i.e. triggers where there was no real event. I could run coax cable, but I want to keep the system as cheap as possible.....