The house monitoring/automation system "project" has been slowly taking shape over 2009, and the basic infrastructure is in place.

Displaying the results in easily digestible form is to me one of the more difficult parts, as distributed displays are still something I have not managed to sort out.

So for Christmas I asked for a Chumby - and due to a slight problem with transport damage to the case I was allowed to open it long before Christmas itself, so I have ad time to experiment with the use of the Chumby for a few weeks now.

The idea was to use the Chumby as a movable display device - it has a nice touchsreen, built in wifi and is based on open source components, so this seemed to be a promising starting point - and to a certain degree it is now working, but the road to getting this going has not been smooth.

The current displays look like this (Click for larger images)

but as the Chumby does not have a web browser (a surprise to me) - the whole GUI is based on use of Flash - getting these displayed took me quite a while.

At the moment the gauges are rendered as .png graphics files by the software using Ruby, then picked up from a Apache webserver running on the same computer by a application I found originally intended to display photo albums from a list of xml image names.

This works as long as I avoid falling into a particular trap where the Chumby seems to have a cache feature where images are cached for a very long time, disregarding any updates and/or cache headers sent by Apache for the files. The only way to do this that seems to work so far is to run another application in rotation with the monitoring application to read random files from one of our photo albums to flush the cache.

I will have to put some more thinking into how to avoid this - and I have a few ideas, so watch this space.

So far I'm happy with the Chumby itself - even if it was more limited that I had expected, but this may also be my own fault, as I do not intend to take up Flash programming in the near future.

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