I've started off by following a project from Low Power Labs, called Home Automation Gateway. It offers all the features i need including encrypted data handling and extensibility. My first tasks were to configure the RPi with Debian and installing NGINX server with PHP5, Pyserial comm port routines, and more. System is up and running but barely tested. At least i do know i am serving https secure pages from the RPi. that was a fun little achievement in itself.

Next i tested the Moteinos with basic Node and Gateway example code to get familiar with them and their RF connections. very easy here. The next challenge was to program one of the Moteinos wireless with the other Moteino. I did this from a Windows based PC, so installed Python for windows and used a script provided by LowPowerLabs for the purpose. not big surprises here either. Wireless programming worked right off and i look forward to using it regularly, even structuring my whole home environment around it.

Then i connected a simple HC-S04 ultrasonic sensor to the remote Moteino and got that working, first using simple code of my own, but now i'm using a ultrasonic library called NewPing. seems to work nicely. it was a simple matter to get that data shuffled over to the Gateway Moteino.

Now i'm starting to receive data into the RPi from the Gateway Moteino using a python script. I'm a novice at python, have been for many years :-) but look forward to gaining a lot of real world experience from this project. My first goal will be to send that relatively raw data to a site such as EmonCMS.org or Thingspeak.com for instant storage and logging. My longer term goal is to store raw data on the remote sensor as much as possible, for backup, and to mainly store it on the RPi in a database, possibly NeDB?, and to serve pages mostly from the RPi in the future.