Getting Warmer

This past summer my family and I took on a little project: we bought a house in Lake Arrowhead and listed it on Airbnb. Because it’s useful to both see and remotely control the temperature there, we had a dual-zone WiFi-enabled Honeywell thermostat installed. And because I’m a nerd, I wanted to track its settings, and the corresponding outdoor temperature, over time.

Behold the Temperature Collector. It runs in AWS Lambda and polls both the thermostats and a public weather API every 5 minutes, writing the results to CloudWatch metrics, where I can then graph them on a dashboard. Pretty nifty!

While I was at it, I added support for a Nest thermostat, which I have here in San Diego. And because I love writing automation, I have terraform code to deploy it all. If you need a simple example of how to create a Lambda that runs periodically, you’re welcome to steal it. That’s the beauty of learning in public.