Welcome to a new series of limited-edition posts from JeeLabs! Read ’em while they last!

Heh… just kidding. They’ll last forever of course, as does everything on this thing called internet. But what I’m going to describe in probably a dozen posts or so is the following:

Hm, that doesn’t quite explain it, I guess. Let me try again:

So this is to announce a new “DIJN” series of weblog posts, describing how to set up your own Wireless Sensor Network with JeeNodes, as well as the infrastructure to report a measured light-level somewhere in your house, in real time. The end result will be fully automated and autonomous – you could take your mobile phone, point it to your web server via WiFi, and see the light level as it is that very moment, adjusting as it changes.

This is a far cry from a full-fledged home monitoring or home automation system, clearly – but on the other hand, it’ll have all the key pieces in place to explore whatever direction interests you: ready-made sensors, DIY sensors, your own firmware on the remote nodes, your own web pages and automation logic on the central server… it’s up to you!

Everything is open source, which in this context matters a lot, because that also means that you can really dive into any aspect of this to learn and explore the truly magical world of Physical Computing, Wireless Sensor Networks, environmental sensing and control, as well as state-of-the art web technologies.

The focus will be on describing every step needed to implement this from scratch. I’ll cover setting up all the necessary software and hardware, in such a way that if you know next to nothing about any of the domains involved, you can still follow along and try it out – whether your background is in software, electronics, wireless, or none of these.

If technology interests you, and if I can bring across even a small fraction of the fun there is in tinkering with this stuff and making new things up as you g(r)o(w) along, then that would be a very nice reward for everyone involved, as far as I’m concerned.

PS. “Dijn” is also old-Dutch for “your” (thy, to be precise). Quite a fitting name in my opinion, as this sort of knowledge is really yours for the taking – if you want it…

PPS. For reference: here is the first post in the series, and here is the overview.