Dive Into JeeNodes (DIJN) is a twelve-part series, describing how to turn one or more remote JeeNodes, a central JeeLink, and a Raspberry Pi into a complete home monitoring setup. Well, ok, not quite: only a first remote setup is described with an LDR as light sensor, but all the steps to make the pieces work together are described.
More visually, DIJN describes how to get from here:
.. to here:
This covers a huge range of technologies, from embedded Arduino stuff on an ATmega-based JeeNode, to setting up Node.js and the HouseMon software on a Raspberry Pi embedded Linux board. The total cost of a complete but minimal setup should be around €100. Less than an Xbox and far, far more educational and entertaining, if you ask me!
It’s all about two things really: 1) describing the whole range of technologies and getting things working, and 2) setting up a context which you can explore, learn, and hack on tinker with in numerous ways.
If you’re an experienced Linux developer but want to learn about embedded hardware, wireless sensors, physical computing and such, then this offers a way to hook up all sorts of things on the JeeNode / Arduino side of things.
If you’re familiar with hardware development or have some experience with the Arduino world, then this same setup lets you get familiar with setting up a self-contained low-power Linux server and try out the command line, and many shell commands and programming languages available on Linux.
If you’ve set up a home automation system for yourself in the past, with PHP as web server and MySQL as back end, then this same setup will give you an opportunity to try out rich client-side internet application development based on AngularJS and Node.js – or perhaps simply hook things together so you can take advantage of both approaches.
With the Dive Into JeeNode series, I wanted to single out a specific range of technologies as an example of what can be accomplished today with open source hardware and software, while still covering a huge range of the technology spectrum – from C/C++ running on a chip to fairly advanced client / server programming using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS (or actually: dialects of these, called CoffeeScript, Jade, and Stylus, respectively).
Note that this is all meant to be altered and ripped apart – it’s only a starting point!