Planet Arduino

Keeping the air in your home in the right condition is incredibly important. Your home is your safe haven from the outside world, a place where you can control your environment and enjoy the comfort and peace of a secure space.

Humidifiers are an excellent way to keep the atmosphere of your home in exactly the right balance for your health and enjoyment. Traditional humidifiers work well, but automated humidifiers can work even better.

In this article, we’ll look at why humidifiers are so useful and how you can use home automation to create your own smart home humidifiers.

Why home humidification is important

• Stay moisturized. Humidifiers keep the air in your home sufficiently full of moisture, which helps counteract the effects of artificial heating systems. This prevents dry skin — especially on the lips and hands — as a result of dry indoor air.
• Keep your sinuses in good condition. Dry air, over time, can cause your sinuses to become irritated. It’s a feeling most people are aware of and can result in discomfort, headaches, and even nosebleeds. A good humidifier helps avoid this, ensuring your sinuses are lubricated and healthy at all times.
• Make it easier to recover from illness. The right humidifier can ease the path to recovery from illnesses like the flu or a cold by helping your sinuses recover.
• Minimise snoring. A noisy bed partner, over many months, can be the source of much stress and frustration. Snoring is a complex issue that can be difficult to solve, but a good humidifier can often ease the problem significantly by providing enough moisture to keep the throat and nose clear. 

Examples of projects

Automatic Humidifier

Living in Boston, Arduino user chenwei19940207 found that the air was so dry, especially in the evening, that a solution was needed. As a result, they decided to develop their own humidifier to turn on and off automatically, ensuring a consistent level of humidity in the air all year round and all day long.

Smart Humidifier

Healthy air has three components — be fresh, clean, and the right humidity. The third factor is important because humans use evaporative cooling (sweating) to rid our bodies of excess heat. This is why humans can be comfortable and safe within a fairly wide range of humidity — between 30 to 70 percent at a push.

But we still struggle at lower levels of humidity. It can result in great discomfort, trouble breathing, and aggravated allergies, and anything below 20% humidity is especially difficult. As a result, it’s best to keep our homes at the right level of humidity.

Recognizing this, Arduino member Md. Khairul Alam developed a project to keep the home sufficiently humidified year round. His device senses the temperature and humidity in your home, checks if it is in the ideal humidity range, and turns on the humidifier to ensure you stay in the right zone.

Arduino Humidifier Control

Arduino “having11” Guy developed this project to regulate the humidity of their home. It involves attaching a dht11 temperature and humidity sensor to an Arduino, letting you modify your humidifier in a way that allows you to automatically turn the device on whenever the humidity in your home drops below a set level, for example 30%.

You also have the ability to set a “cooling down” period, avoiding the humidifier becoming overheated.

NOTE: It’s worth noting that this project uses high voltage and amperage, and doing any of these steps incorrectly could result in serious injury or even death. So be careful and don’t attempt this without any prior experience or skill!

Build a healthier smart home with Arduino

With Arduino, controlling the humidity of your home is just the beginning. Our Project Hub is filled with examples of home automation projects, using all kinds of technology to make their homes smarter, safer, and easier to live in.

Check out our site to find out more uses for Arduino and how you can get started with your own home automation projects.

The post Humidify the air around you with home automation appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Home monitoring is a big part of home automation, but it’s often overshadowed. Our attention tends to get hijacked by cool projects that perform physical actions. Whether it’s turning the lights on, changing their color, running a robot vacuum cleaner, pulling on the blinds or watering the garden. All these actions are very cool and very visible. Which makes it easy to ignore the background tasks that are the backbone of great home automation.

YouTuber and robotics maker RootSaid has been giving this a lot of thought. He’s put together an excellent tutorial on creating a self contained, real-time home monitoring module. It’s built around the excellent Nano RP2040 Connect, and sends everything to Arduino Cloud.

Home Monitoring for You, and Your Family

His objective was to create a compact bundle of sensors to keep an eye on various conditions around the home. This battery powered system can then be positioned anywhere, and monitored from Arduino Cloud. His idea is to install the module in an elderly relative’s home. That way, he can keep an eye on their environment from anywhere.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be used purely as a care system. That’s a great application for his environment monitoring platform, but it’s just as useful for your own home automation system. Too often, sensors (temperature, for example) are physically connected to other automation devices, like Wi-Fi mains switches. But chances are you want to know the temperature over by your sofa. Not down the back of the TV cabinet.

RootSaid to the rescue.

A Compact Home Automation Sensor Module

Let’s take a look at the sensors bundled into this compact package.

He’s got an LDR in there to monitor the light levels. This is perfect for bigger home automation projects, as it can trigger lights all around the house. Even outdoor lighting, if you wanted.

There’s a Bosch BME280 to keep an eye on the environment. This is becoming a popular device among the home automation crowd. It’s small, very low power, cheap, accurate, and gives you temperature, humidity and air pressure data.

Finally we have a gas sensor, which is a really interesting addition. Especially as part of his original brief for monitoring an elderly relative’s environment. It keeps a check on air quality, but being able to get alerts for gas leaks or rising carbon monoxide levels could be life saving.

Home Monitoring in Arduino Cloud, for Free

Finally he takes you through the Arduino Cloud set up, including a monitoring dashboard. Which is more good news, since all this is running from a single Nano RP2040 Connect. That means you’re only adding one Thing (with five variables), so the free tier is a practical option. If you want to begin comparing the data the module collects over time, you can then easily bump up to a subscription for longer data retention options.

Because he’s collecting data through Arduino Cloud, he’s automatically got smartphone access to it, as well. Or, if he wanted to share the data with members of the family or household, it only takes a click.

Although RootSaid is running his module from a 9V battery, there’s nothing to stop you using other power sources. The Nano RP2040 Connect will accept all kinds of voltage inputs. From USB to 12v PSUs, your power options are wide open here.

This is a project that no home automation enthusiast should overlook. It’s small, simple and very easy to build. But it’s also the gateway to creating a great home automation system. If you’re only just getting started, this is the project to begin with. It’s the tiny module where all the important data comes from to make your home truly autonomous. RootSaid’s excellent tutorial also makes it easy to see how you can expand on the project in lots of ways.

Check it out, and make sure you subscribe to his channel.

The post Self Contained, Cloud Connected Home Monitoring Module appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Instead of controlling his temperature and humidity display directly, maker Zaphunk did things a bit differently, driving the temperature of each segment with a Peltier element, or thermo-electric cooler (TEC), to change its color. 

Each segment is made out of a thermochromic material, cycling from a black off state to a greenish hue when on, for a device that can—somewhat ironically—show the temperature by changing its temperature.

Ambient conditions are read via a DHT22 sensor, and everything is controlled by a half-dozen Arduino Nanos. This number boards were needed in order to power the nine dual motor drivers that handle the Peltier elements, each of which require two PWM outputs, along with 5 IO pins. 

The display looks great in the video below and Arduino code is found on GitHub.