Just thought I'd share a little accomplishment I achieved with BI and Home Assistant! I recently put a small propane heater in my shed to keep it warm when working out there and to hopefully keep liquids stored out there from freezing. All assuming I don't burn through my 100lb tank too fast making it too expensive to maintain! (First-world problems!). I wanted to be able to monitor the temp so I know if the heater quits.
I have a Raspberry Pi out there as a cheap way to access the interwebs for fertilizer amounts, viewing UI3, etc. So I installed NodeRed onto that Pi and hooked up a DHT11 Temperature sensor. NodeRed checks that temp every minute and publishes it to an MQTT topic. Super simple!
Home Assistant subscribes to this topic so I can graph it and get alerts if it drops too low. I also have Grafana running on docker so I can see the temp compared to outside. Cool! But what would be cooler is if I could view the temp on-screen through the shed in the camera. You can see the temp drop this morning when the heater shut down for some reason. It took several hours to drop from 30 degrees so the insulation must be working.. hopefully better once I seal up the attic access hole!
Blue Iris is connected to my MQTT broker so it was easy to set up Home Assistant to post to the BI HTTP interface through MQTT. Whenever the temp reading in the shed changes, Home Assistant posts to the BlueIris/admin MQTT topic with a payload telling BI to add the temp value to Macro 10. See the below Home Assistant Automation Action.
The Trigger is fired whenever the temperature value changes. I did not specify From/To/For values. Just the state of the entity.
The action is simply publishing that value to MQTT for Blue Iris.
In Blue Iris you just add an overlay to your camera and reference the macro number.
The camera has an overlay that displays the text from the macro along with an "F". So now I can glance at the screen and see the temp! This heater has settings of 1 through 5 with no specification as to what temperature each setting corresponds to. So now I can see at what temp the heater kicks on and off and estimate what that range is. The lowest setting appears to be around 60 degrees. The temp sensor is currently dangling from the shelf above the alarm keypad there. I'll have to experiment with locations to get the most accurate measurement.
Please ignore the mess out there! Just finishing up installing a ceiling to keep that heat in!
Now to research thermocouples compatible with the Pi to sense if the pilot light goes out!
EDIT: 5/18/2021 Some images were broken, added new and revised some instructions.
I have a Raspberry Pi out there as a cheap way to access the interwebs for fertilizer amounts, viewing UI3, etc. So I installed NodeRed onto that Pi and hooked up a DHT11 Temperature sensor. NodeRed checks that temp every minute and publishes it to an MQTT topic. Super simple!
Home Assistant subscribes to this topic so I can graph it and get alerts if it drops too low. I also have Grafana running on docker so I can see the temp compared to outside. Cool! But what would be cooler is if I could view the temp on-screen through the shed in the camera. You can see the temp drop this morning when the heater shut down for some reason. It took several hours to drop from 30 degrees so the insulation must be working.. hopefully better once I seal up the attic access hole!
Blue Iris is connected to my MQTT broker so it was easy to set up Home Assistant to post to the BI HTTP interface through MQTT. Whenever the temp reading in the shed changes, Home Assistant posts to the BlueIris/admin MQTT topic with a payload telling BI to add the temp value to Macro 10. See the below Home Assistant Automation Action.
The Trigger is fired whenever the temperature value changes. I did not specify From/To/For values. Just the state of the entity.
The action is simply publishing that value to MQTT for Blue Iris.
In Blue Iris you just add an overlay to your camera and reference the macro number.
The camera has an overlay that displays the text from the macro along with an "F". So now I can glance at the screen and see the temp! This heater has settings of 1 through 5 with no specification as to what temperature each setting corresponds to. So now I can see at what temp the heater kicks on and off and estimate what that range is. The lowest setting appears to be around 60 degrees. The temp sensor is currently dangling from the shelf above the alarm keypad there. I'll have to experiment with locations to get the most accurate measurement.
Please ignore the mess out there! Just finishing up installing a ceiling to keep that heat in!
Now to research thermocouples compatible with the Pi to sense if the pilot light goes out!
EDIT: 5/18/2021 Some images were broken, added new and revised some instructions.
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