happiness is more iOT - my eunuchs, part 3

 

I have been looking forward to putting one of the Shelly Uni to work at the front gate. The Shelly Plus 1 module I installed inside the gate opener has been working flawlessly once I sorted out some quirks. The quirks involving changing wireless SSID. The only way you can change the SSID in these devices is you have to be in communication with it in. It can only connect to one and only one that you tells it to.

Because I want a different SSID for the AP at the front gate this created a problem. After wiring in the Uni at the front gate, I have no way of connecting to it as it still try to connect to the SSID in the house, and my iPhone can only connect to the front gate's AP. I was dead in the water and have to bring it back to the house for a solution.

My solution is to change the 2.4GHz guest channel in the house to the same SSID and password as the one at the front gate. Powered up the Uni in the house and tells it to connect to this one rather than the one in the house. That worked. Once I done that I brought it down to the front gate and wire it up into the solar powered networking system there.

the photovoltaic shed that house the batteries and networking equipment

I prepared a harness with a 4 pin connector so I can retrieve the Uni should I need to bring it back to the house for test or debug

In the above photo there are two group 27 marine batteries for the solar PV storage. While the aggregate power consumption of the surveillance cameras, the PoE doorbell, and the network equipment draws about 1.3A at 12V the storage capacity is needed for winter days when the PV harvest is much lowered. In fact if the panels are covered in snow there will be no charge at all, and the batteries can run down after a couple of days. Should the batteries is too depleted, the solar charger is programmed to switch off the loads to protect the equipment as well as the batteries.

I named this Uni eunuch jr. as it is the second one I powered up and configured

to clean up the devices at the front gate I removed the other Uni called eunuch

I didn't like the few choices of images for the "room", so I uploaded one from my photo library.

this is a lot more polished

There are two digital inputs, and two digital outputs that are currently not used. The two buttons are for the digital inputs. I only wish the Uni has one more ADC. With another ADC I can monitor the charging current. I don't feel like adding one more Uni just to be able to do that. In case you wonder, I bought the cheapest solar charge controller. It cost $10 and is good enough for my needs.

Just the ability to monitor these parameter of the PV power system is only half done. I want the Shelly eunuch jr. to send me notifications should the battery voltage or temperature reaches extremes. This is accomplished by creating two "scene". I set them to trigger on min and max. If I receive a notification, I can then check the realtime value of out of range parameter.

the two "scene" that I created to monitor the out of range conditions

I spent 2 days sorting out the IP addresses of all my networking devices. I also made some with static IP and compiled a spreadsheet of all the devices with their MAC addresses. The spreadsheet is invaluable for trouble shooting network problems. So far I counted 55 network clients! There are actually a few more as some have been in dormant months. With that many network devices, the 8 years old Net Gear Nighthawk router seems to be taxed. I takes over a day for it to compile all the connected devices. Sometimes a device does not show up in the list despite it is clearly connected.