On: Writing documentation for your house

[abraae]

I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our water tanks (we live on rain water).

Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak and mysql running in AWS?

I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myself if that happened.

[edrxty → abraae]

Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.

[Sakos → edrxty]

Because they can, I guess? There can be fun had in over-engineering personal projects. It can also be educational. It's no more odd than

> grafana, spring, keycloak

[grogenaut → Sakos]

Seeing a setup like this would cause me to start walking away from a house. But to be fair I'd be walking away from just about any smart setup.

[zilti → Sakos]

There is absolutely no fun to be found anywhere in AWS.

[abraae → edrxty]

Just for history. Current values are available without internet on the esp32.

[SpaghettiCthulu → abraae]

why not use a local server, even just an RPi?

[j45 → SpaghettiCthulu]

Sometimes the library pushes easier to a cloud.

Managing storage and more can still be work and worth doing as a second step since most of the time it’s worth doing the setup over at least one more time.

[abraae → SpaghettiCthulu]

Mainly visions/delusions of a water monitoring SaaS, but it would probably run just fine on a pi

[camel_gopher → edrxty]

I did something similar but with a small netgate box.

[bigiain → abraae]

Nah, sell them a monthly subscription for the cloud service. Or put ads in their dashboard and alerts. (Or both. Then work out how to sell their water usage data to 700 "partner" 3rd parties...)

[arcanemachiner → bigiain]

Then go out of business and leave them with an expensive paperweight.