Shed Interior Temp to Blue Iris Overlay!

[th182]

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.

 

[Jessie.slimer]

Super cool. I've been meaning to experiment with getting the thermocouple that monitors the flue temp of our wood burning stove to send values to Smartthings in order to control the fan, and somehow get this macro over to BI so I can overlay it onto a camera watching the stove while we are not home. Your success is inspiring me.

 

[th182]

Super cool. I've been meaning to experiment with getting the thermocouple that monitors the flue temp of our wood burning stove to send values to Smartthings in order to control the fan, and somehow get this macro over to BI so I can overlay it onto a camera watching the stove while we are not home. Your success is inspiring me.

If I figure out the thermocouple I'll be sure to follow-up with a post. In the meantime I positioned a camera to watch it burn.

 

[newfoundlandplucky]

If I figure out the thermocouple I'll be sure to follow-up with a post. In the meantime I positioned a camera to watch it burn.

Integrating a thermocouple would be a fun project. Maybe a digital sensor like BME280 or BMP280 would work too.

 

[silencery]

Nicely done.

You can do the same thing with your other home assistant items (heater on/off, door open/closed status, alarm status, etc)
I've been using bi macros for this very same purpose on a different home automation platform.

 

[th182]

Nicely done.

You can do the same thing with your other home assistant items (heater on/off, door open/closed status, alarm status, etc)
I've been using bi macros for this very same purpose on a different home automation platform.

View attachment 76144

That is awesome! Now I have more ideas for my ever growing list of things to implement!

 

[th182]

I fixed some of the broken screenshots here. This worked flawless all winter to keep an eye on things. Home Assistant notified me if the temp dropped too low, so I knew to change the propane. I quickly learned my cheap $12 regulator was not cutting it as the pilot would just go out randomly. I upgraded to an auto-changeover two-stage regulator and added a second tank. Ran beautifully all winter! And I only burned through three 100lb tanks.

 

[rmalbers]

OP: Very nice work! You could probably use one the of metal temp probe types (bbq/oven type) around the pilot light, that might be cheaper and easier than a themocouple.

 

[ServiceXp]

Thank You @th182

 

[th182]

Thank You @th182

You’re welcome! It’s still going strong all this time later. Just built a greenhouse (the one from Costco) and of course it will have a camera inside with temperatures displayed. Although instead of the pi and NodeRed, I’ll be using a Wemos D1 Mini flashed with ESPhome from Home Assistant.

 

[TheWaterbug]

Nice! Here are some other temperature-related goodies:

I'm using this to monitor my hot tub, and it helpfully logs measurements every 10 minutes, with data available in many different ways, many of which don't require internet access, and none of which requires a paid subscription:



For my streaming BeeCam, I'm overlaying weather via:

curl -s 'api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?id=5388601&APPID=<myAppID>&units=imperial' | /opt/homebrew/bin/jq '.name,", ",.main.temp," ºF, ",.weather[].main' > temp1.txt

I've been overlaying it on my YouTube stream via ffmpeg's drawtext filter, but I didn't know I could do it with BI as well. Thanks!

 

[prsmith777]

You’re welcome! It’s still going strong all this time later. Just built a greenhouse (the one from Costco) and of course it will have a camera inside with temperatures displayed. Although instead of the pi and NodeRed, I’ll be using a Wemos D1 Mini flashed with ESPhome from Home Assistant.

Funny you mentioned a greenhouse camera. I just finished building our greenhouse and went searching for how to overlay weather data on the camera and found your post. Works great. I ended up using three macros for temp, humidity, and CO2 levels as I could not figure out how to add a carriage return/new line for a single macro with three separate lines

The data on the screen cap is not real-time as I haven’t received my Ecowitt sensors and gateway yet. Will be straightforward adding from HA once I get it in and running. Thanks for your post.

 

[Mike A.]

Funny you mentioned a greenhouse camera. I just finished building our greenhouse

And a damn nice one. Looks great. I ran a couple of research and commercial greenhouses in another life long ago. None were as nicely done as that looks. Good job.

 

[th182]

Funny you mentioned a greenhouse camera. I just finished building our greenhouse and went searching for how to overlay weather data on the camera and found your post. Works great. I ended up using three macros for temp, humidity, and CO2 levels as I could not figure out how to add a carriage return/new line for a single macro with three separate lines

The data on the screen cap is not real-time as I haven’t received my Ecowitt sensors and gateway yet. Will be straightforward adding from HA once I get it in and running. Thanks for your post.

Well damn that puts my little greenhouse to shame! What are you using for a CO2 sensor? I've toyed with the idea of replacing the wax vent control arm with a linear actuator and let HA adjust it as needed. I added a fan and door contact sensor so if the vent is open and its too warm, HA kicks the fan on. I also have some grow lights that I hung but haven't used or automated yet. I think its going to be too cold to try and keep anything alive over the winter so hopefully can get going right away in the spring.

Here is mine.. its a mess as we never finished cleaning it out at the end of the season.

 

[prsmith777]

I went with all Ecowitt for greenhouse sensors including their WH45 multisensor with CO2. They are on the slow boat from China, so I haven't gotten them yet. I thought their pricing wasnt bad compared to others and they do not rely on the cloud for data transfer to HA.

I have the linear actuators for my windows. I made the mistake of getting 120volt motors. Should have gone with the DC motors for better control through HA. The actuators have open and closed set points so you dont go too far one way or the other and damage things. I am controlling using ESP8266 Wifi relay board. I timed out how long it takes to open and close then programmed in HA accordingly.

Using Ecobee Lite thermostat controlling the heaters which is also HA controlled.

One last thing is a vent fan in the side wall for air exchanges and cooling in the summer.. Its on HS103 Kasa wifi plug controlled by HA

Ive got the benches to build then will figure out the watering. Have a Rachio in there now.

Heres a pic of the front.

 

[th182]

I had not heard of those sensors before. Looks like they cover all the bases!

I use OpenSprinkler for all of my irrigation. I already had it for the lawn so just added an expander for some greenhouse zones. All stays local and integrates with HA nicely. Each bench is a zone plus one runs outside to a raised bed.