Andrew O'Brien (Jun 25 2025 at 01:39): Andrew O'Brien (Jun 25 2025 at 01:39):I want to have have my fridge and chest freezer send temperature telemetry to something I own, either on-prem, cloud, or maybe even a metrics SaaS so I can monitor them and get a notification if things are in a bad state. When I search for this I get a bunch of consumer things that want me to install an app on my phone, which I'm assuming talks to their servers.
But this should be a pretty simple microcontroller + sensor + battery + wifi thing, so I don't really want to bring a random 3rd party into this. But also, I don't necessarily need to build the thing myself. So I'm wondering if homelabbers know of some off the shelf hardware that's not bound to the vendor's infrastructure in some way.
Anyone monitoring metrics about their homes? What are you capturing and what are you using to do it?
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jun 25 2025 at 01:51):i don't know about any wi-fi connected sensors that don't require some cloud service to connect it all together as a one-off operation, let alone any that don't require continuous cloud connectivity
(they could exist, i just don't know)
however, for my setup, i grabbed a few of these zigbee connected sensors, and they're working really well without ever having connected them to an app or a cloud: https://3reality.com/product/temperature-and-humidity-sensor-with-digital-lcd-display/
but i did need to add a zigbee gateway to my setup
Matthew Sanabria (Jun 25 2025 at 04:17):https://gist.github.com/sudomateo/90bdb20a7822c119a7054bac3409f300
I threw that on a Pico W to monitor temps.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jun 25 2025 at 04:31):i wonder if the Pico W can be shoved in a fridge/freezer? :)
Scott Abbey (Jun 25 2025 at 10:43):I recently went on a similar hunt for fridge/freezer sensors that would work with Home Assistant. I wound up settling on these: https://a.co/d/gaf3Z7G
They work over Bluetooth LE, so you need a bluetooth proxy for HA, but I never installed the Govee app on my phone. They just worked.
Andrew O'Brien (Jun 26 2025 at 14:17):Thanks for the suggestions. Yesterday I got rabbit holed because I was trying to figure out if I wanted to try to turn an old Android phone into some kind of BLE telemetry hub with built-in cell+battery failover or add a UPS and cell HAT to a Pi Zero 2 with a sensor probe either directly connected to I2C or wireless with BLE or Zigbee.
Last updated: Jun 28 2025 at 14:14 UTC