New here, never used Ardunio or Raspberry Pi, project idea

[pife]

Hello everyone,



I have a project I am looking at starting, I would appreciate some tips, nudges in the right direction.



A little background on my project/myself:



I live in the middle of no-where Alaska, as everyone knows, it gets cold up here. I have 2 different boilers in my house to provide heat. One is a wood/coal unit, the other is a oil burner boiler. The way the systems is set up, the wood unit is primary, and the oil is secondary. As long as the temperature of the water in my system is above 160'f, the oil will not fire up, once the water temp drops off, it will activate. (in other words, if me or my wife decide to not stock the wood boiler up at night, the oil boiler kicks on around 4-5am)



I want to somehow track, and log the temperatures of the water input and output on the wood boiler, the temperature of the oil burner flue(which means it kicked on), the outside temperature, and the oil tank fuel level.



I am ordering a 4ft sensor for the fuel tank from here:



milonetech.com/t/etape-liquid-level-sensors



I have not gone much past that yet, I am planning on building this and making sure its operational by next fall. I know how to solder, basic troubleshooting, and jury-rig pretty much anything.





I have spare craptops available - win XP stuff, and dont mind ordering everything else I would need.



I wouldnt mind this setup to be scalable in case I decide to go further in monitoring stuff. I have eventual plans to make a wood drying area in my garage after in get a swamill built this spring. That would need temp monitoring and humidity.



Thanks,

Any help / pointers appreciated.



Pife

[papa]

Welcome, pife, to the DIY Home Automation party.

I recommend that you use computourist derived code & builds. They have proved to be stable.

You might first look at computourist's gateway & DHT end node. Then look to threads where more features & documentation are provided like ...

You might look at my Success... posts where I give detailed documentation on parts lists, using the Arduinos, building the nodes, using OpenHAB on Windows computers, etc.

You might also look at lewishollow's thread Re-imagined RFM node code - All-in-one, low power, OO design

You will need some radio transceivers so your devices can be wireless.  Since you're in the U.S., you probably should get the 915Mhz version of the RFM69 transceivers, whose frequency is acceptable for U.S. use.

              Specifically addressing what you propose to do ...

About what you mention at the end "I have eventual plans to make a wood drying area in my garage after in get a swamill built this spring. That would need temp monitoring and humidity." you might actually start there to get your feet wet. You'd build & program a computourist gateway & a DHT (heat humidity) sensor node. computourist's stuff & my Success... posts starting on Oct. 8, 2015 might get you thru that.

Regarding "I want to somehow track, and log the temperatures of the water input and output on the wood boiler, the temperature of the oil burner flue(which means it kicked on), the outside temperature, and the oil tank fuel level." ...

For the water temps, you might look at DS18 sensors which can handle liquids. That's one aspect of the Multi-Choice Node that gandalph & I worked on. If by "outside temp" you mean temp outside your home, the DHT end node (if somewhat protected) might work for that. You'd probably need to use the DHT22 version of the sensor to handle Alaska's temperature ranges. Alternatively, you can probably have OpenHAB server get a close enough outside temp via an internet weather service.

I'm not sure about the fuel tank sensor you purchased. You'd need to know about the sensor's output signal, digital ON/OFF or (probably) analog range of values, & you'd need a code library to add to the DHT end node program sketch to handle the signal. I recommend you do an internet search using Arduino & the name of that sensor.

Best wishes on your efforts.  You can probably get other questions answered in this forum, but please provide enough info on what you've tried & your results, so one of us can better respond.

And then when you get your successes, we'd love you to post how you got there especially on things not yet addressed here, like the fuel level sensor.

[papa]

Pife, you might also look at my Multi-Choice End Node thread.