Potential use cases for Ignition Maker at home - has anyone tried these?

I’m considering a variety of use cases within Ignition, though I’m also too busy to tinker much these days. If anyone has had similar success, it would encourage me to try these native in Ignition rather than getting a traditional smart home device.

  • Sprinkler system control
  • Thermostat / forced air / hydronic heat controls
  • Air quality management / air exchanger / humidifier / forced air fan cycling

What other ideas have people tried for home automation in Ignition Maker?

Ignition Maker is very good.

Its major advantage to me is the competency you build at work makes implementing something in Maker dead easy at home.

Its reliance on an active internet connection is major drawback to me. I’ve been migrating all my logic into Node Red and using Ignition purely as a UI. I don’t want to have cold water in the morning because my ISP’s billing department messed up my account.

Whatever you do in Maker, bear that limitation in mind.

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I have successfully built a sprinkler control system using Ignition Maker Edition running on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I wrote a module which exposes the Raspberry Pi as an OPC device using the Pi4Jv2 library so that I can read and write to the Pi’s GPIO pins using OPC tags in Ignition. This has been driving one of my sprinkler zones at home for the past year with no hiccups, and I’ve been meaning to dust off the module and the project and roll it out to the rest of the sprinkler zones now that I have proved it out. Be warned that the module is pretty experimental, so if you decide to use it or build off of it, use it at your own risk :slight_smile:

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My personal project if I ever have the free time to do is is a home garden system with automatic watering schedules, or more advanced, watering based on soil readings. So cool you were able to do this with a sprinkler system - makes me think my thing is feasible!

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Yeah that is something I’d love to do as well! It’s definitely feasible.

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I would echo what @deon.korb has said. Although, I probably rely on it a lot more as our ISP has been pretty reliable, and the 4 hour lease time (I think it’s still 4 hours?) is more than enough for any short outages. I have been considering taking the leap to Node Red or HA though and use Maker for the pretty stuff :thinking:

A few things we use it for in our household...
  1. Electronic configurable dashboard
  2. URL Casting between Ignition Clients
  3. Asset tag tracking
  4. Logging fuel usage
  5. Temperature & humidity tracking
  6. Light control
  7. Garage Door control
  8. Finances

We mainly use the Perspective app via mobile, but I do have a nice floorplan layout for the house lights :slight_smile:

Current project is to create some nice charts for the fuel logging, and to start logging power consumption/generation. Oh, and experimenting with RTSP feed cameras with the very helpful module: Automation Professionals' Image Streamer Driver Module - #62 by pturmel

More than happy to share what I have, if it isn’t already public on the Exchange.

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