Raspberry Pi Home Automation

Well I've had some spare time over the last week (hopefully many others have as well!) and wanted to update my gang of Raspberry Pi's that I use for home automation. Right now my home automation is primarily remote control of LED strip lights that I have installed in the toe kicks of my kitchen counters and bathrooms. It is very handy for Laura (my wife) and I to remotely turn the lights on and off from our phones or tablets at night if we just want a little light in the kitchen or need to make a run to the bathroom (grin).

This is a photo of an old PC power supply used to supply the 12VDC for the LED light strips and 5VDC for the pi, Raspberry Pi, JFET Switch Board & Dual Relay board. I'll break everything down and explain each item in future posts (This, I'm hoping, will give me the incentive to post on a regular basis!!!)

I'm curious about how much energy is consumed by the pi and lights, so I hooked in a kill-a-watt meter to measure the consumption. This 3.13 kWh is over the span of 65 days (measured the uptime of my raspberry pi). 3.13kWh / ~ 2 months = 1.565 kWh / month x 0.068 / kWh (current Alberta energy rate) = 0.106 or about 10 cents per month! And we use the LED lighting pretty much every night for a few hours. I'm not sure how accurate the kill-a-watt meter is, but I'm pretty confident that it is giving me a good approximation!

Thanks for viewing!
Robin