Monitoring of all windows and doors of our Smart House. This is the main purpose of my self-made project DI2MQTT. While part 1 was about hardware for the project, this blog post is dedicated to the software.

Are all the windows closed when leaving the house? Is the skylight closed when it starts to rain? I asked myself these questions many times after moving into our passive house and looked for a technical solution to automatically detect and evaluate the status of our windows, doors, and locks. The article below deals with the most reliable, convenient, and inexpensive evaluation of these window and door state conditions.

It has always been a concern for me to see which commercial providers I entrust my private data to and pay money for regularly. I’m not alone in this, because the search term “self hosted” brings up several blogposts describing the path away from commercial providers to self-hosted open source services. In the following, I describe my (still not fully completed) journey towards a self hosted digital life.

For a long time, I have been looking for a way to illuminate our carport. Our entrance light next to the front door is on the one hand too weak to illuminate the entire carport. On the other hand, I wanted to install a more flexible illumination in terms of brightness, colors and effects.

Down when it’s dark, up when it’s bright - what’s so difficult about automated shutter control? That were my first thoughts when I started to program our shutters in the house. But when does it exactly get dark? And how do I deal with the shift of that time during the year? Can I also use the blinds as heat protection during the day in the summer? And how do I prevent a closed shutter of the living room window from locking me out on the terrace in the summer?