mintpeaks.com is my personal home control and information site, powered by Node and tessel.io
- Tessel app mintpeaks-tessel - Node.js app for Tessel
- Node app mintpeaks - Node.js app for streaming Tessel data (TCP socket, Express, Socket.io)
- Alexa Skill mintpeaks-alexa-skill - Alexa skill to get climate data by just asking
This simple app displays the real-time temperature and humidity from my apartment.
To do this, I wrote a node.js app for my Tessel microcontroller that gathers the climate data.
Tessel connects to a second node.js server over a TCP socket and posts the data as JSON.
That process in turn also runs an express/socket.io server, which this dumb static site connects to via websockets and streams the real-time data.
For this to work, you need a Tessel 2 which is a small hardware prototyping system, basically a micro-controller that runs Node.js out of the box.
You'll also need to buy the climate sensor for Tessel 2 which connects to the Tessel via the 10-pin connector.
Because the Tessel gets warm when running it can skew the measurements. I solved that by purchasing a simple 10-pin extension cable from Adafruit.
Here's how it looks:
I was not able to get this running on Tessel 1, since their WiFi module couldn't handle sending data for more than a couple of hours before freezing completely.
Tessel 2 seems to work great so far.
If you happen to own any of the Amazon devices that support Alexa, you can ask for all of this climate information with your voice.
Watch the video to see it in action:
