I’ve started work on a plug for the room sensor nodes, since it’s too tedious to wire up lots of them by hand.
Meet the 20x21mm “Room Plug”:
It has room for an SHT11/SHT15 type temperature / humidity sensor, an LDR as light sensor, and one of two types of PIR motion sensor. There are two positions for the LDR, depending on which type of motion sensor is being used.
In normal use the plug will be fully populated and placed as a bridge over ports 1 + 4 (or 2 + 3) of a JeeNode or JeeLink, but it’s also possible to only mount one or two sensors and – depending on which sensors – to plug the board into a single port, pointing upwards. Or even to use it as breakout board for a standard Arduino, or any other setup you like for that matter.
I’m going to look into a few more plug ideas before having prototypes made, to reduce cost a bit since these plugs are so tiny. Many sensors are not really worth a custom-made board, since the generic JeePlug will let you hook up most of them yourself. But having said that… if you’ve got suggestions for a hookup which would be really cool to have as ready-made plugs, let me know!
Hello Jean, you are working in the right direction. You now, i’m planing the same. It would nice if you provide place for an DS18B20 1wire tempsensor. I wan’t to use this one instead of the SHT11. Also nice to have would be an LCD plugged in or hooked up to the jee node for displaying the aktuell Temp,Time and so one. kind regards, Thomas
im again. do you heard something about the new hope rfm22 chips ? they have integrated temperatursensor and integrated 8bit adc. would it be an idear to make new jeenodes with rfm22 ? kind regards Thomas
Thanks for the tip on the 1-wire sensor, I’m adding it in right now.
The RF22/RF23 chips are nice, but more expensive than the RF12 and they draw more current (though more sensitive). The temperature sensor is only 5 bits, I think – not enough for environmental monitoring, and not really calibrated. See this link for a comparison – http://blog.strobotics.com.au/2009/07/30/introducing-the-rfm2223-big-brothers-to-the-rfm12b/
I don’t see that much reason to switch the JeeNode/JeeLink to it right now. But I’ll make sure that the packet format works with all RF chips, in case there is a need to switch later.