Barry's Blog

We fitted a LightwaveRF magnetic sensor to a door to detect whether it is open or closed. The main driver behind this was to increase the level of the hallway lights for a predetermined period of time whenever the door was opened. Since we’re using coloured lights it makes sense to put the light back to how it was once the time period as elapsed.  Node-RED does not offer a node as a means of storing state between, but it does offer functions which have access to a context object which can be used to store state between flows.  I’ve created a flow which listens to the `domoticz/out` MQTT topic filters messages based on their Domoticz IDX value and furthers filters on the door switches `nvalue` where 1 indicates door open and 0 indicates door closed.  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/174818/FrontDoorLight.json On Door Open: Retrieve state of current light and if nothing already stored, store the current bulb state in the context.  Change the ...

We recently purchased Hue bulbs for our Kitchen they’re great, but since we already have an RFXCom 433 unit (as per my blog on automating hifi), we wanted to automate the lights and invested in a Lightwave PIR motion sensor.  I downloaded Domoticz [ http://domoticz.com/ ] on an SD Card for my Raspberry PI and also installed node-red [ http://nodered.org/ ] a tool for filtering and processing MQTT messages.  Domoticz is used to store the state of the motion sensor and is configured to emit an MQTT message whenever the state changes.  We also wanted the lights to have a different colour depending on the time of day we enter the kitchen, for example during the evening we might want a relaxing light, meal times a white light above the dining table and during the day some multi coloured lights, but not change them if they've already on.  For each of the time slots of the day, a template has been created containing the settings of each of th...