Follow up: Temperature/Rain Sensor

This is a follow up on this article: => Click.

A couple of weeks after I build the temperature and rain sensor, I’m now coming back to this with quite some improvements, which I’d like to share with you.

Problem I: Short lifetime of rain sensor

Problem II Battery was draining fast

I’ve also updated the code and make it way more efficient. See here. E.g. I’m now activating wifi only after measuring the sensor data…

Problem III external node service as backend

Influx is an open source time series database. You can run it in their cloud (then you only have 30 days of data unless you pay for more) or you can install Influx on your server (which I did).
Your ESP can then send the data to Influx. You can build nice dashboards and visualize the data as you like.

Homebridge-Influx Plugin
In order to get the data into Homekit, I build a Homebridge plugin, called Homebridge-Influx.
This plugin connects to your Influx server and collect the latest value from the server, providing it to Homekit. This is neat, because you only have to do 1 network call instead of 2.

InfluxDB Dashboard
InfluxDB Dashboard

Problem IV too many wires

Some of the mistakes above were made solely because I was a noob when it comes to building such sensors, however by writing this, I hope I can save you some time :)

ESP Backside
Backside
ESP Frontside
Frontside

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Working @Instana, Loving tech {...life}

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