Moisture Sensor: Nothing more than a glorified rain gauge that you can query for the current reading. As implied above, it tends to sometimes read a (small) non-zero number when there is actually nothing in there. Note that rather than query this every time, it is sampled hourly and those results are displayed.
Garage Sensor: Again, nothing fancy here, you've probably seen a similar device advertised (or at Open Houses) where a light comes on in your kitchen/bedroom if you left the garage open. It also has the ability to tell you if the garage is actually in motion, so if you get "lucky", it will tell you this (plus you may see the garage door partway up in the picture, depending on the timing).
Ground-Motion-Cam: Standard motion detector type stuff. It has a little bit of a difficult time getting a correct reading at night ... but fortunately there is a lot of light from the 22,000 xmas lights - or however many are currently ON! Takes a little bit of tuning to get it to do the right field-of-view that is semi-close to what the WebCam is seeing, but it is usually in the ballpark without too many false positives/negatives. If you look closely, you can see the person in the picture, but this is often hard to to see.
Road-Cam: Similar to above, but looking at the road in front of the house. While a moving car is an easy object for the motion detector to pick up, it's again a challenge to get the field-of-view correct ... plus since the webcam picture is not taken at exactly the same time that the motion detector is queried, there may be a disconnect. Savvy folks might ask if you can estimate the speed of the cars based on the "smeer" of the lights and knowing the camera shutter speed ... I haven't done any speed/timing tests! ;-)
Sky-Motion-Cam:Now this is COOL!!!!! I live about 30 miles
NW of Denver International Airport ... but more significantly,
about 10 miles North of Jeffco GA airport, so there is
a fair number of airplanes that fly overhead at reasonable altitudes.
Airplanes are always supposed to have red/green lights on the
left/right wing, and they may have their "main" lights on, which
is all visible to your eye, especially if they are oriented toward you.
So I wondered if the
motion detectors (with the gain turned as high as possible) could
pick up a moving airplane. it turns out this is doable - note that
stars are visible, but don't move much! So then I said to myself,
could I determine WHERE the airplane is by restricting the field-of-view
of the motion detectors - i.e. put 3 of 'em up there pointing to
the left, middle, and right ... and it works pretty well, so depending
on which one indicate motion, that is mentioned.
BTW, as an aside, I noticed
that the webcam DOES pick up the stars, but their brightness appears
to be variable and are sometimes not even visible. I guess this
is just CCD randomness - there's not a lot of light coming from those.
Sky (Cloud) Sensor: This was even tricker than the Sky-Motion-Cam described above, but it uses the same Cams. At the top of the hour, the images from the camera's are downloaded and analyzed, with an attempt made to see how many stars are visible against a "baseline" of a cloudless night. While the results are pretty variable, an assessment can be done of how many stars, depending on how many are visible, that gives some idea of how cloudy it is.
Total house amperage load:This is fairly easy - just a MEASUREMENT of how much total amperage is coming through the house breaker box. This includes other stuff besides the xmas lights -note that in the "lights box" I show the total amps from (only) xmas lights currently ON, but this is CALCULATED based on what zones are currently active - i.e. while I did take one-time readings of the amperage/circuit, there is NOT an an active amperage measurement per circuit, only of the entire house.
Steady-State Voltage:If you have ever measured voltage over a period of time at your house, you'll see that it varies quite a bit; another good reason to have Surge protectors, etc. And as you can imagine, switching 22,000 xmas lights ON & OFF can cause quite a bit of fluctuations, so we take a measurement after an ON/OFF command, and if there is a sag/surge, that is shown. This "Steady-State Voltage" is based on a measurement taken at the very end (actually two measurements are made and then averaged) with the idea that things have settled down by then.