End Of Life Cycle

KitchenDuino has run for the best part of a year attached to a laptop where it was saving climate and some movement data using gobetwino, which is just a software terminal that reads data, optionally formats it, and saves it to a file.

Now that laptop has finally died the death of a thousand melted fans, and sadly is no more, at least until I can find a new cooling fan and CPU.

Never mind, this did produce enough data for me to work out where to place IR movement sensors to best isolate movement data from two separate areas and temperature / gas/smoke / IR flame detection and use that to manage the LED strip lighting in several groups, the extractor fans, alarms, and a fireplace monitor for winter to ensure the fire gets relaid every time it's in danger of going out.

The Twist

Since some perfectly good Uno boards have now come out with ESP8266 WiFi built right in, and also there are ESP8266 shields that basically give a whole second processor piggybacked onto a Uno board, the revised version will end up as a new project and no longer dependent on a laptop to log / control / manage settings.

Accordingly I've retired KitchenDuino and will begin V2 with a new project, and more details because I think it'll be the release version. So to speak.

What I've Learned

That if you want to drive several metres of LED strip lighting you need a decent PSU, something along the lines of a 3A - 5A switchmode. (I've got almost 10 metres arranged around the kitchen and dining room and need to add about 5 more to get the illumination to where it covers all the needed areas.)

You need a decent 5V supply to drive a 4 relay or 8 realy control board, and to make sure everything is hunky-dory with WS2812 LEDs etc, it needs to be fairly stable.

Accodingly, the next KitchenDuino V2 will be combined with an old PC AT/ATX PSU which will supply all the low voltage requirements. As the WeMos boards seem to be all 3.3V based and a PC suppy has 3.3V as well, this might just be a match made in heaven. You can get old AT/ATX power supplies for free just by hanging around the ribbish bins of computer repair shops and replacing the fan in any that are thrown out. (The fan is the #1 reason these PSUs get ditched, believe me.

First round of software was pretty horrible, I'm still learning. Second round will be included in the filebase here, also on github.

And lastly, I've learned that I take wayyyy too few progress photos. Hope to remedy that with the next poject.

Onward!