ESP-12

[Anonymous]

I’ve never been thrilled with the features of the various sensors and detectors you can get to keep an eye on various things in the house. For those so inclined, you can outfit a cheap, programmable microcontroller to do your bidding and control or monitor just about anything. We have had a ton of rain this winter and just yesterday. I used an ultrasonic distance-measuring sensor, and hooked it to a ESP-12 board that has wifi. Drilled two 5/8” holes in the top of my sump pump lid, in the right place, above the water and not piping in there. The program I wrote averages the data and then sends it out when connected via a web browser. This morning, water is still flowing into the pit at around a centimeter every 3 minutes or so. A big value here is to trigger an alarm if the water level gets too high, i.e. representing a pump failure. Detect a leak BEFORE it’s a leak.

You can use the Arduino IDE to do the programming and upload the firmware to the ESP.

I took an ipad first-generation (2010!) and put it in my kitchen, and basically have a status board for various temperature, leak, and condition sensors around the house. You can do this too, if you have a little c code programming experience or care to learn it. And the parts are 5s and 10s of dollars, easy to get from Amazon. You also would need a soldering iron and some other sundries.