Inkbird and Home Automation

[jayk34]

i currently have a non wifi inkbird and thought that it might be fun/useful to have the inkbird wifi ITC 308 so that I could monitor it remotely. Also thought that it would be useful to include it into my home automation (homeassistant). I just managed to get my Homeassistant image installed onto a new SD Card as my last one failed after only 2 weeks !!! Was wondering if anyone has been able to setup the inkbird ITC-308 wifi in homeassistant ? I searched the homeassistant forum and also here and there doesnt appear to be much info. One post did suggest to install the tuya app in homeassistant and to use that to control the inkbird.

Would be interested to see if anyone has this setup and how easy and useful it is .

thanks

 

[Ashman]

Well I looked at getting live temp’ data out of the 308 Maybe a year ago but few had done it. Looking on the web the Company now seem to have released new versions of the apps so you maybe about to hack something together.

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

If you are only looking to monitor the temperature through home assistant you could build a sensor and use mysensors.

I use Domoticz HA and built a fridge monitor using an arduino with mysensors which monitors the temperature from a probe in the fridge and also alerts my if the fridge door has been open too long.

https://www.mysensors.org/controller/homeassistant
https://www.mysensors.org/build/temp

 

[jayk34]

Cheers, I might have a look at domoticz as my homeassistant server went down again after getting it setup again. Seems to be a known problem that a lot are having issues with.

 

[uDicko]

Ooooooo. Been looking at all this recently. You may save me a load of effort. Can you do IFFT rules to control fermentation temperature through the use of an ispindel. Obvs with heat and cooling plugs/methods?

 

[Ashman]

Ooooooo. Been looking at all this recently. You may save me a load of effort. Can you do IFFT rules to control fermentation temperature through the use of an ispindel. Obvs with heat and cooling plugs/methods?

I found IFTTT to be very slow (minutes) but might be ok for brewing I guess.

 

[ChilledGecko]

Another vote for Domoticz with MySensors.
IFTTT has just gone virtually pay only, 3 widgets allowed. Though saying that my old widgets still seem to be working.

 

[uDicko]

Think I'll explore red node and mosquitto on a Pi. Nor sure what to use for graphing though.

Anyone set up ispindel with successfully using MQTT broker (mosquitto) before?

 

[uDicko]

I found IFTTT to be very slow (minutes) but might be ok for brewing I guess.

Think ill try a local version. Similar principle to IFTT

 

[ChilledGecko]

I'm using Node Red with MQTT for managing my Zigbee units into Domoticz.
Not used it fro my iSpindel but I guess the principle will be the same.

Have a 'google', someone's bound to have done it.

 

[uDicko]

Not used it fro my iSpindel but I guess the principle will be the same.

Most recent firmware appears to support MQTT

 

[ChilledGecko]

Yeah, I've seen it. Just not used it.
There seems to be five (if I remember correctly) values coming from the iSpindel - Temperature, Tilt, Specific Gravity, Battery Volts & WiFi Strength
You just need to get MQTT to see them, pass to Node Red, perform any required operations and pass the data onward.

 

[uDicko]

The challenge begins

 

[Ashman]

If you are only looking to monitor the temperature through home assistant you could build a sensor and use mysensors.

I use Domoticz HA and built a fridge monitor using an arduino with mysensors which monitors the temperature from a probe in the fridge and also alerts my if the fridge door has been open too long.

https://www.mysensors.org/controller/homeassistant
https://www.mysensors.org/build/temp

I might take a look.

I did a crude monitor With the salus it500 heating controller. Essentially the device is run with an accessible http address. I just setup a cron job to fire off a script that then scraped the JSON object to get actual temperature and set temperature data and chucked it someone (I think a Csv database But could have been google sheet) . Though as it’s a heating controller there isn’t a temperature probe and not sure on accuracy . Technically I did rig it up with a plug as it was able To turn a home central heating boiler off and on. I never worked out how to set a program eg. Set the cron job to automate a diacetyl temperature increase on xyz date.

 

[JT_Brews]

I use an iSpindel and a Python script running on a Pi to monitor temp. The control is done using RF controlled plugs and a wifi->RF relay (it's what I had laying around) but you could suplement any other control mechanism without much difficulty.

I looked at the various automation software for brewing and it all seemed very over-the-top for such a simple task.

 

[jayk34]

Just got the inkbird 308 wifi on the amazon prime day sale and love it. Its great to be able to see the temperature as i was constantly going into the utility room to check it and lying in bed at night wondering if it was working. My wife says I need to seek counselling about this issue and she might have a point

After spending a lot of time working out how to set it not to turn on the cooling relay as I don't have any cooling I think I finally got it. I know its not rocket science but couldn't work it out and had a page full of figures trying to work it out. Then trying to work out the cold crashing routine so that both the heating and cooling relays didn't start was "entertaining". For cold crashing set up a routine that set the SV value to 5°C, heating differential to 0.3°c, cooling differential to -40°C and setting a low temperature warning of 5°C. Although this routine is not necessarily needed as I could unplug the inkbird, it satisfies my OCD to constantly monitor the temperature

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Just out of interest, these days you can get WiFi enabled control boards (e.g. ESP8266 - Wikipedia) for quite literally the price of a cup of coffee. For anyone with a bit of hobby electronics experience these are pretty easy to wire up to pretty much anything you like, and you can program them in the very easy (and free) 'Arduino' software tools.

I do a lot of embedded programming and occasionally have time to help people out if they get stuck ;-)

 

[uDicko]

Well..

Using mosquitto as an MQTT Broker
Node Red as the automation driver
InfluxDB for data
Grafana for some pretty pictures.

It all looks to be working in my test scenarios. I have two spindels configured to work on mqtt and the data is flowing through nicely to Node Red (for some simple graphics) and the InfluxDB too.

Done direct write to influx on one and Node Red MQTT back to influx on the other.

All in cost. Its set me back probably £40 all in for the Pi 3b+, Case(had one knocking about) SD card and an old mobile phone charger for juice.

All the above bits of software are open source packaged bits and bobs. Whilst daunting to start off with has not taken any real effort.

I now have (I think) a fully functioning smart home controller which enables me to read and interact with MQTT devices (think plugs, relays, sensors etc) and collect information on it all.

Now to figure out if it will help me make better beers

 

[jayk34]

Well..

Using mosquitto as an MQTT Broker
Node Red as the automation driver
InfluxDB for data
Grafana for some pretty pictures.

It all looks to be working in my test scenarios. I have two spindels configured to work on mqtt and the data is flowing through nicely to Node Red (for some simple graphics) and the InfluxDB too.

Done direct write to influx on one and Node Red MQTT back to influx on the other.

All in cost. Its set me back probably £40 all in for the Pi 3b+, Case(had one knocking about) SD card and an old mobile phone charger for juice.

All the above bits of software are open source packaged bits and bobs. Whilst daunting to start off with has not taken any real effort.

I now have (I think) a fully functioning smart home controller which enables me to read and interact with MQTT devices (think plugs, relays, sensors etc) and collect information on it all.

Now to figure out if it will help me make better beers

Sounds excellent. Are you using any specific home automation software or just some flavour of raspberry pi os?

 

[uDicko]

Took me a while to decide on what to go with. This lot seemed to fit.

homeassistant.io - Was a good starting point but ended up being too complicated strangely enough! Its overall interface is great, but if you encounter any issues say - getting Node Red to behave or Mosquitto pub sub to work as intended I found I was limited in the online support available and it all was click and use through Home Assistant.

I wanted:
a way of tracking and logging things
a way of interacting with things
a way of interacting with things based on the tracking of other things
a way of presenting it all

Plenty of guides around I could reference if people are interested but its just a Pi 3b+ with Raspian Lite 32Gb SD (cos I'm probably going to end up with loads of things attached to it eventually).

Next up will be finding a suitable smart plug that lets me mod it for MQTT that's not going to break the bank and I will be looking to thread the Node Red automations and Spindel data to do something fancy