Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit.

Over the past 12 months or so I’ve been looking to add various “Smart House” components to my home, rather than do this in the traditional sense of buying something off-the-shelf I’ve been experimenting and building my own. One of the real plus points in me doing this is that all the data that is passed around is in an open standard and format chosen by me, not some cludge to try and extract information in a format decided by a-n-other manufacturer.

I thought I’d finish off the year with a bit of reflection, overall it’s been a pretty good year in both camps of my life - the geek/tech and the family side. Obvious highs of the year include: Birth of my second child, Alfie. OggCamp 13 LinuxCon Europe Barcamp Blackpool RossLUGs 3rd year - some fantastic meetings this year. It certainly has been a full on year. It’s been a really tech filled year, as since moving house last September I’ve had my own space for all my tech which is a real bonus.

It’s been a while since I stayed up most of the night writing code, mainly down to having a young daughter but also down to the fact I haven’t found anything that needed a late night hack session to produce a result. This weekend changed all that, I’ve been playing around with home automation for a while but am now actually taking the plunge. I purchased a load of Arduino and electronics kit over the last few days to start prototyping the setup.