Ruuvi Sensors & Gateway | Off-Grid Ham Shack

January 30, 2024 Julian OH8STN battery power, Education, Ham Radio, ham radio on solar power, LiFePO4, off-grid ham shack, Power Queen LiFePO4, Ruuvi Gateway & Sensors, Solar Power, Solar Power for Ham Radio 0

Hello Operators.
Today I received a device that should solve the temperature monitoring problem I’m having in the shack. The issue was not being able to see the indoor temperature from outside the ham shack. Now I can remotely monitor both indoor and outdoor temperatures from the web, shack or my phone.

I’ve been using Ruuvi sensors for some years. Usually using these sensors to monitor the temperature both inside and outside the tipi tent or bunker while using a wood stove. Today I added two more Ruuvi sensors, one inside and another outside the ham shack. I also added a device called a Ruuvi Gateway. With Ruuvi Gateway, one can remotely access their Ruuvi sensors from anywhere in the world. The gateway can be connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, providing reliable telemetry updates to the cloud. Essentially, the Ruuvi Gateway replaces the mobile phone as the bridge between the Ruuvi sensors and the Ruuvi Station app. Instead it pushes the telemetry data from the Ruuvi sensors to the Ruuvi Cloud. Telemetry can be viewed on the cloud using the Ruuvi Station mobile app and/or the Ruuvi Station browser app.

RuuviTag is a wireless Bluetooth sensor node that measures temperature, air humidity, air pressure and movement. You can read live measurements and historical data directly on a smartphone using Ruuvi’s mobile app for Android and iOS. Combined with the Ruuvi Gateway, the data can be pushed to the cloud for dissemination to the Ruuvi web app, and viewed on a mobile device.

The Ruuvi gateway collects telemetry from the sensors over Bluetooth.  It then uses my shack internet to forward that data to the Ruuvi station cloud. I’m not a big fan of the cloud functionality, but there is a way to store that data locally. For now, it was important to have access to the temperature readings from anywhere I happen to be.


The Off-Grid Ham Shack

Since installing the diesel heater in the ham shack, it was important to monitor the inside air temperature, ensuring the LiFePO4 batteries weren’t charged while below freezing.

Having remote access to the temperature readings inside the shack, let’s me see if it’s warm enough to allow charging of the batteries. There’s also an alarm feature that I’ve set at freezing.  This will send an alert to my phone to say, ” Hey, your batteries are about to freeze. “

Now I can remotely start or stop the diesel heater, without needed to be in the ham shack. Of course the Bureck diesel heater thermostat controller will do this task once it arrives. Even after it is installed, I’ll still like to monitor the temperature remotely.

Eventually, I will use the Ruuvi sensors and Gateway to monitor the battery storage temperature. With the additional solar panels incoming, the 5160watt-hours of LiFePO4 temperature should be monitored. The Ruuvi sensrs will let me see what temperature the batteries are, at certain times of the day. I’m hoping that functionality can be logged along with input current from the different strings of solar panels, providing a map of incoming current vs time of day vs consumption vs battery temperature.

In this following video, you can see how the diesel heater keeps the ham shack warm during the harsh Finnish winters.

Anyway, I thought you all would get a kick out of the Ruuvi sensor and Gateway setup..
https://www.ruuvi.com

73
Julian oh8stn
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oh8stn
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Blog: https://www.oh8stn.org

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