Richland Home Temperature Measurement:

In what is likely to be a moment of nerd weakness, I have started on the Richland version of the home temperature measurement system I had up and running in Wichita. (This is ignoring many, many other things that I have on my to-do list such as:

• Update/repair the digital picture frame (video driver is dead and I'm probably going to update to a Raspberry Pi 3)
• Finish the retaining wall in the back yard
• Debug the Lorenz project so I can take it into work with self-respect
• ...)

Due to the layout of this house, I'm not able to very easily implement this as a wired system and have been hunting around for good wireless options. I decided on using Low Power Lab's Moteino which uses the RFM69 radio. The radio has range should be more than sufficient to cover the range of my house and the Moteino can come with the radio installed and associated libraries make it easy to get the system up and running.

As I found out today: in less than fifteen minutes I had the sample system up and running with one node sending packets and the other receiving them (and acknowledging back to the sender the reception). With another thirty minutes of work I had the remote programming also working. This will be important as I plan on putting some of these nodes in hard-to-reach places and having the ability to wirelessly update their code will be important.

This was the hard part made easy. Now the hard part for me: start thinking through how this system is going to work and get my head around wireless communication paradigms.