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Home Automation System for a Camp with No Internet

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could start warming up the camp before you leave the house? How about using Alexa to do it for you!

My Idea is a home automation system for a camp with no internet.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could start warming up the camp before you leave the house? How about turn on some lights because your getting there late? Maybe you would like to know what the temperature is in an outside the camp. Well with Alexa and my cellular home automation project you could. From your home, just say “Alexa, start warming up the camp at 5:00pm,” Alexa will send a trigger to my system to turn on the heat on at the time requested.

My system will use arduinos to control devices and read sensors. The arduinos will send or receive the information to a Raspberry Pi using mqtt where the Pi can connect to the internet using a Hologram Nova cellular modem.

There is a couple assumptions,

1. You have power at your camp, the gateway can run off of batteries and solar, but it wasn’t tested to see how long

2. Even though you dont have internet, you still need to be in an area where cell phones work.

Sensor:
For the hardware, we will use an Arduino MKR1000 and an 8-channel relay board. See the schematic for wiring info. The MKR1000 still has a few extra IO pins, so if you wish to add a few more sensors there is space.

The sensor emulates a WeMos. I was able to find some code online that does this for an ESP8266. I used that code to port it to the MKR1000 for sending and receiving the messages.”

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