What's up, home? part 16

Can you monitor your several years old dumb Roomba iRobot vacuum cleaner with Zabbix? Of course you can! By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and make weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about this project.

This post will be tad a bit shorter than usual, as my summer vacation is looming and I have many other fish to fry before that. However, my motivation to this post became as we might or might not get some visitors to our home this weekend, so doing the hoovering and stuff would be a good thing to do.

Monitor your robot vacuum cleaner with Zabbix

So, I just did put our Roomba to do some initial cleaning. While doing so, I attached the RuuviTag I used in my last week's post to our Roomba, and of course did so by using the gorgeously ugly brown tape to secure Ruuvi's trip.

As RuuviTag has acceleration sensors, it maybe possible to record Roomba's movements by using Ruuvi? Does it work? Of course it does.

See, it works!

This is so far my most rushed blog entry, as I literally started this experiment about 30 minutes ago. The RuuviTag was already configured to my Zabbix, as it's the same one that is/was measuring if our dog Lily is in her bed.

However, Lily's presence was detected by utilising Ruuvi's temperature sensor. This Roomba experiment is by checking the readings from RuuviTag acceleration sensors. See, it works!

From the graph we can clearly see 1) the moment I did transfer RuuviTag from Lily's bed to Roomba and 2) Roomba's movement.

So, from these graphs I can then see for how long Roomba was doing it's stuff.

But why?

OK, this is a stupid example, but in the real world there would be more practical applications for this kind of monitoring. For example, monitor something that should NOT be moving (maybe a grill in your backyard or a safe at work), and if it starts moving, immediately suspect that something is not right. Or, monitor something that should be in constant move (conveyor belt?) but is not, and alert accordingly.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and adding more data points to monitoring is still fascinating.