[TriLUG] OT: home Automation

[Peter Neilson]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 13:32:12 -0400, Keith Woodie <kwoodie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Anyone doing anything with home automation?
> ...
> Thoughts or recommendations.

I've wanted farm automation for a long time. Cheap. What I need are  
sensors that will tell me, remotely, if I've left the water running, and  
 from which of about 20 spigots. Also, whether each section of the electric  
fence is working, and if not, where the fault (short or open) is. I'd also  
like to connect or disconnect sections of fence remotely.

The fence is a particularly difficult thing to automate because it's  
pulsed DC, roughly 1 millisecond spikes every second, up to 10 kv. There's  
a lot of local RF from those pulses.

Automating the sheep and goats to come in for feeding is trivial by  
comparison. You're lucky not to get trampled.

Hardened Arduino or Raspberry, anyone?