Hi Gang,
I'm relatively quiet on this board, but I did feel compelled to share (with anyone interested) that the value of my Ecowitt System (GW1000 gateway + a whack of sensors....) took a massive leap forward in usefulness within the past few weeks. I wanted to take an opportunity to share my "discovery" with others, with the hopes it may precipitate (pun fully intended....) similar breakthroughs and/or usefulness.
For those of you who use or know about Home Assistant (the open source home automation platform), I was thrilled to find that someone had developed an integration for Ecowitt systems (
https://github.com/garbled1/homeassistant_ecowitt).
(Incidentally, I'm actually curious whether the author (Garbled1 aka Tim Rightnour) is part of this board. If so, MASSIVE kudos go out to him.
)
Back to the task at hand.
Having integrated my Ecowitt and Home Assistant systems, has benefited me in 2 aspects:
1) New and useful (and customizable) ways to display the sensor data (example below). I must admit, I do like the look of the dashboard as provided by Ecowitt. No knocks against that whatsoever. But, now I can insert individual sensor data in other parts of my home automation / displays / dashboards. For instance, here is a dashboard that I have created for my vegetable garden, showing only those sensors that are important to me for gardening:
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Don't pay too much attention to may garbled layout... I'm still experimenting with what types of gauges / sensor layout I prefer.
2) Ability to trigger home automation routines using Ecowitt sensor data. As an example, I am now triggering some lights to come on in the late-afternoon / early-evening, based on readings taken from the Solar Radiation sensor (as part of my WS68 Wireless Anemometer sensor). Conversely, I have lights turning off in the morning, once it is sufficiently light out. This is much more desirable than a time-based approach, as depending on cloud cover, I may want to delay turning off or on the lights. This is now fully automated:
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I do have some more weather-condition-based automations in the queue. For example, I have a chicken coop door controlled by a microcontroller (also connected to Home Assistant) and linear actuator. It automatically opens each morning at sunrise. But, if it was pouring rain, for example, I may want to delay opening the door. To accomplish this, I could check the condition of the "rate of rainfall" sensor data as a condition, to ONLY open the door (after sunrise) once a rain-rate has fallen below a set threshold. I'm not sure I will actually do this exact automation, but it gives you a flavor of what types of things are possible. The sky is the limit, I expect.
Again, just wanted to share in this experience and "plant the seed", as the saying goes. I'd be happy to hear from anyone who has also mated these 2 systems together - I welcome you to share some of your automations and dashboards!!
Regards,
Ray