♾️ - My Good Friend +♾️
Let's talk to an Arduino Yun and have it talk back to us!
For roughly the past decade, the Arduino Yun has monitored, controlled, and actuated my garden projects and it's how the whole 'Decent Smart Home' thing really got started. With remote actuation over an established wifi network, I've been able to use numerous Yun's around the house to monitor 2-3 gardens, indoor and out, as well as develop a fullstack web interface to monitor and control growth coupled with a water and power harvesting/generation system. By gathering the data involving the realization of my actual local potential, making sense of it algorithmically, and then sharing relevant data on a decentralized network, multiple 'next level' realizations start to occur.
I suspect the same will happen for all of you now realizing your local potential.
Without further ado...
Power up your Yun with the usual Usb doohicky.
Watch the lights blink. Rejoice. Resign to the your desk with your favorite beverage.
Take a look at your wifi networks and change over to the 'Arduino Yun - yadayada'. If the network does not pop up within a few minutes, it's likely out of range. You will need to do some antenna gymnastics beyond the scope of our happy fun time here. The best hack to success is a BAEC (Big Ass Ethernet Cable) - in which case the Yun will be picked up by your router and assigned an address. To know which address, you can connect it within range of your wifi, sign in as described below, and check the dashboard for the address it picked up.
The default network that will always pop up after a clean Reset will allow you to connect your computer over wifi to the Arduino Yun so you can change the basic network options and hop on a password protected channel. We will be setting some configuration options and changing the password in OpenWRT - perhaps worthy of a whole other blogpost at a later date ...
Right!
Open a web browser (on a desktop with a big screen will be best)
navigate to: https://192.168.240.1 or arduino.local
password: arduino
Successful entrance to the Mind of your Good Friend looks like this:
Note the two addresses displayed - the default and the wired. If you needed to know what address your router was providing to the wired ethernet port of the Yun, this is the one. Click Configure and we will change some config options.
- Give your board a name,
- a more personalized password (write it down and leave it with the board),
- set the timezone
- configure a wireless network on your home wifi (need your home wifi password)
- Open REST API Access
Click configure & restart,
switch your computer back to your home wifi network,
then navigate to your newly configured Yun at MyDecenSmartHome.local (or the assigned ip address)
Soooo, whether you had to go through all that or you just wired a connection directly to the Yun from your router,
Now that you're connected we can upload our algos and play with them without having to arduously unmount the arduino every time from its relay board. If you're board is not already mounted happily in its final operating station, now is a good time to do so.
Open the arduino ide and upload the blink sketch from your desk. Sip your beverage. Rejoice again. We will be making Infinitely Many changes to the algorithm from right here at your control station. We will see the actuation displayed in near-real-time from a web browser as we sense our environment and attempt to sway it in our favor as efficiently as possible. As the years go on, we will continue to make adjustments according to your interests and behaviors.
When you sit down at this Decent Smart Home control station, you will have enlightening moments of realization when your dashboard puts otherwise hidden data associations right before your eyes. Once you know, it's easy to make changes. You will find yourself wedging out more and more time to fine tune your 'Life Machine' because, as you do - it reciprocates! That is, the better your assistants are carrying out life's basic tasks, the sooner you can get to the fun and more advanced stuff! For now, we're going to have it help us grow our own foods and medicines while making sure we use energy as efficiently as possible.
If your Arduino Yun is mounted and you uploaded the Blink sketch - and you've sipped your beverage - then go journey to the Yun and check to see the onboard LED is blinking. If so, look around at your new grow space. Soon there will be well timed switches and fans and pumps and lights - it will seem much more alive. It will seem to 'tick'. The arduino is, in fact, just a really advanced timer. Throughout the years, we will time it and adjust its timing as well as our own. We will have it interact with its surrounding environment and by using its sensors to time its actuators.
If you've made it this far, and you're wondering why go through all the hassle:
With our Arduino Yun connected to our local wifi, we'll be able to update our code whenever we want, right from our desks. Now that the upload process is streamlined, we can make any number of changes to our hardware and then add the necessary code in our software stack to make use of our various new sensors and actuators.
As our Smart Homes gather their useful data and we realize the advantage we Decent people have if we compile and share our chosen datasets and let our smart homes crunch the numbers away from Big Bro with the Comm Cap - We may decide to leverage our newly found skills and powers to negotiate a better living between ourselves right from home. To best do this, we need to post our data for all the Decent people to access and for the Oracles to develop and make better sense of it than we ever could. 🔮
Make sure you check out the 'Good Friend' and 'Food Forest Menu' bounties on Decent Smart Home's MintMe! You'll also get an Ommm token bounty from Decent Agency to run an IPFS node!
bounty programs:
https://www.mintme.com/token/DecentSmartHomes
https://www.mintme.com/token/Ommm