Your Raspberry Pi Projects

HvRooyen said:
So my house has a solar geyser (not connected to electricity) and an inside (connected) geyser. The two are connected with a water pump that can circulate water from outside to inside if the solar geyser becomes warm enough. So far a GeyserWise system has been managing the element / pump. Had to replace the pump recently, and the electrician advised me that the geyserwise control system wil not last much longer.

Enter GeyserPi: a Raspberry Pi with a relay board:
View attachment 531193
View attachment 531195
Click to expand...
Well done very cool. If you read up on Legionnaires' disease you'll see the lowest you need temps is 60 if you want to turn your geyser down to save power. ;)
 
Wasabee! said:
Well done very cool. If you read up on Legionnaires' disease you'll see the lowest you need temps is 60 if you want to turn your geyser down to save power. ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks. I notice Eskom advises "over 55, ideally 60". According to the WHO over 48 is bacteriostatic, at 50 degrees 90% die within 1-2 hours, and above 60 is disinfection range.
 
Last edited:
HvRooyen said:
Thanks. I notice Eskom advises "over 55, ideally 60". According to the WHO over 48 is bacteriostatic, at 50 degrees 90% die within 1-2 hours, and above 60 is disinfection range.
Click to expand...

How are you getting the temperatures? What sensors do you use?
 
A few months ago new neighbours moved in - sort of. At least 5 dogs reside there permanently, and the people themselves only really stay there occasionally. Most of the time the dogs are bored, and bark through the night.
Enter the dog silencer:
A RPi, a relay board, a sound detector, an ultrasonic sound generator and the necessary speakers.
Some Python code triggers the sound cannon when noise is heard on that side of the house during the night, blasting the dogs with 120dB of 22kHz sound.
Problem solved.
 
Last edited:
HvRooyen said:
A few months ago new neighbours moved in - sort of. At least 5 dogs reside there permanently, and the people themselves only really stay there occasionally. Most of the time the dogs are bored, and bark through the night.
Enter the dog silencer:
A RPi, a relay board, a sound detector, an ultrasonic sound generator and the necessary speakers.
Some Python code triggers the sound cannon when noise is heard on that side of the house during the night, blasting the dogs with 12dB of 22kHz sound.
Problem solved.
Click to expand...

Brilliant.

Need a solution like this, only for helmeted guineafowls... a massive plague here by me.
 
Last edited:
xrapidx said:
Does it actually work?
Click to expand...

No doubt. It has happened twice now that we noticed the dogs barking again - both times the Pi was unplugged. There is also a more long term effect in that they now tend to bark (if they do) on the other side of the neighbours' house.
 
Some nice pimations you have going there.
Do you have a link for the geyser system, would like to do some reading.
 
rodga said:
Some nice pimations you have going there.
Do you have a link for the geyser system, would like to do some reading.
Click to expand...

That gyser system has me wanting to dig into that! Sounds epic and +1 on the link would be great.
 
Unfortunately no single link for the system.
Hardware:
(RPi, power supply and SD card - duh.)
(Some wire, a terminal block, some soldering, a nice box to put it all in)
Thermistor
Relay board - adapt as needed (note this relay board is GPIO low active). I only use 2 of the relays: one for the element and one for the water pump.

Note that although the RPi relay can handle 230V, it cannot handle the current draw of a geyser element. For this I enlisted the help of an electrician, who installed a more substantial relay. In other words, the small relay on the RPi just triggers a larger relay that directly controls the equipment. This has the added benefit of making all the wiring above board from a certification perspective.

Software was done by [MENTION=98970]Cor Cronje[/MENTION] and can be found at BitBucket. It is still a work in progress, but works a charm. I intend expanding it to warn of element / pump malfunctions, as well as home automation integration. We will certainly appreciate any constructive comments here.
 
Last edited:
Congrats to HvRooyen. Actually putting in the design work and following through all the way to completion. More than I can say for myself most of the time. All the projects look great and although I haven't seen the wiring, getting an electrician in should mean that everything is good on that side too. Great stuff!
 
Pseudonym said:
Congrats to HvRooyen. Actually putting in the design work and following through all the way to completion. More than I can say for myself most of the time. All the projects look great and although I haven't seen the wiring, getting an electrician in should mean that everything is good on that side too. Great stuff!
Click to expand...

+1
 
Aw shucks. Thanks.
:p

Another great RPi project I came across: If your house is automated to the degree mine is, you want to know that everything is still running (corrupted SD cards happen!). NEMS / Nagios is a nifty distro that can be set up in an hour, and will monitor all the other machines on your network and advise you when they are acting up.

I have also noticed that if you have enough devices spread around the house, and your router and NEMS machine are on a UPS, you have a nice remote power failure monitoring system. If an earth leakage switch pretty much anywhere in the house trips, I know about it.
 
If you're suffering from corrupt SD cards and running that many pi's, maybe check out pi server and network booting. Got it setup for wall boards in a call centre and it works very nicely.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X