www.gisvold.co.uk - development

Gas usage measurements

tor — Sat, 08 May 2010 18:07:59 +0000

The software measure our gas usage in the house is coming along slowly - I have attached a LDR to one of the Jeenodes and found out the light level when just the pilot light is on, and the light level when the burner is on.

so I can now detect the transitions when the boiler turns on and when it turns off, and from there calculate how long it was turned on for.

This all looks a bit strange at the moment :

Wattson power meter

tor — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:11:06 +0000

I've created a page for sample code for accessing data from the Wattson energy meter.

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Shapelock

tor — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:21:30 +0000

From my favourite magazine - Make :
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The LCD Jeeplug

tor — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:13:47 +0000

Getting a LCD display working with a Jeenode is easiest done using a LCD plug - but it took me much longer to get it working than I had expected.

And it all turned out to be a stupid mistake on my side :

If you can see the small potentiometer (on the top right hand side of the main chip) - it's really difficult to turn, and it controls the contrast. It turned out that it had not moved when I put a screwdriver in and turned it...

At the start I did not solder the correct 3 bridges on the card either....so lessons learnt and so on.

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Mango, open source M2M

tor — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:55:33 +0000

I've just come across Mango - a piece of software that may be of interest to me in my house monitoring experiment:

Mango, open source M2M

Welcome to the home of Mango, the world's most popular open source Machine-to-Machine (M2M) software (also known as Industrial Control, SCADA, HMI, or domotics). Mango is browser-based, Ajax-enabled M2M software that enables users to access and control electronic sensors, devices, and machines over multiple protocols simultaneously. Easy to download and install on many platforms, Mango provides an interface with which diverse data sources can be created and configured while providing downstream management of user access, alerts, data logging, and automation.
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Electricity usage - from the Wattson

tor — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:04:27 +0000

Electricity usage as recorded by the Wattson

(Click for larger image)

and as recorded and graphed on pachube for a period of a month

This is our house electricity usage - read in realtime by Ruby software running on a Mac Mini (home grown software as such) through the Wattsons USB port.
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Status of our home monitoring

tor — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:50:40 +0000

Our home monitoring system is coming along with the addition of a set of jeenodes (see them as wireless and battery driven Arduinos)

The slave nodes look like this :

the green box houses the 3 AA batteries making this a truly wireless solution, enabling me to move this around to anywhere in the house.

At the server things look like this

My first Jeenode transmit

tor — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:55:41 +0000

How exiting is this - today my replacement radio for my blown Jeenode arrived, I soldered it in (correct way around this time) and a few seconds later this appeared on the console of my receiving Jeenode :

The OK/ack's shows that valid datapackets have arrived, and that they have been acknowledged back to the transmitter.

The second to last byte (225) is the current temperature multiplied by 10, so in other words 22.5 degrees celsius.

I'm happy!

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array development electronics Jeenode Open source OsX

wow - a RFID emulator

tor — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:54:35 +0000

This is a bit scary - a working RFID emulator! (Oyster card emulators anyone)

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Jeenode == Arduino for wireless monitoring

tor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:49:42 +0000

I came across the Jeenode today

and I've fallen in love with it - and am definitely going to use this as nodes for my extended measurement system for the house - as it will become a lot less expensive to deploy than Arduinos, with the really neat ability to be run from batteries!

And it uses a set of add on daughterboards

with the necessary sensors onboard - all based on the SHT or 1820 sensors which I already use!

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My Chumby and the Arduino

tor — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:06:56 +0000

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.
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Our house online

tor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:37:48 +0000

I have now added a new site to display all our house sensors online. All data is collected and stored on the excellent Pachube site, and all the graphs on the site are automatically generated from the collected data.

(Click for larger)

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Our house is twittering

tor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:36:06 +0000

As with all modern houses ours has at long last started twittering

(Click for larger)

it's of course called "gisvoldhouse" and so far tells you the temperature and humidity level in our garage, and the outside temperature.

More to come - courtesy of a Arduino connected through a Ethernet shield, and a piece of Ruby software running on our webserver.

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Arduino and Ruby

tor — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:53:57 +0000

As I am trying to get started with Ruby at the moment this is extremely interesting :

Arduino IDE Meets Ruby
Scripting languages have evolved a lot in the recent years. Ruby in particular, has had such a significant impact, that there are entire teams dedicated to maintaining it's visual identity across the web.

Designed by Tom Schaub is a widely used logo for the ruby programming language.

Sporting some flashy ruby icons, is the Scripting tab in the Arduino IDE. Upon startup, a listing of your ruby script files is generated from your Sketchbook directory.
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Reconstructing an Apple II+ as a project

tor — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:52:16 +0000

Wow - I used to love my Apple II, and have great memories of it and it's 6502 CPU. SO I may just have to read the rest of this story:

Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA
Stephen A. Edwards
Columbia University
As a Christmas present to myself in 2007, I implemented an 1980s-era Apple II+ in VHDL to run on an Altera DE2 FPGA board. The point, aside from entertainment, was to illustrate the power (or rather, low power) of modern FPGAs. Put another way, what made Steve Jobs his first million can now be a class project for my 4840 embedded systems class.
What is an Apple II?
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bitlash - a interpreter for the Arduino serial port

tor — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:45:45 +0000

Hm! - Interesting concept 0 I will have to try this out over the weekend:

Introducing Bitlash

Bitlash is an open source interpreted language shell for the Arduino serial port. It runs on the Arduino and interprets commands that you type in a terminal window or send programmatically:
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A Arduino Client for MQTT

tor — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:06:16 +0000

The attached article is pointing to a implementation of the MQTT protocol for the Arduino - extremely exiting. I am going to experiment with this soon :

Arduino Client for MQTT
This library provides a client for doing simple publish/subscribe messaging with a server that supports MQTT v3.

For more information about MQTT, visit http://mqtt.org.
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MQTT.org - MQ Telemetry Transport

tor — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:03:23 +0000

After I started to build Ardunio projects incorporating sensor it quickly became clear to me that a protocol for exchanging the data these sensors generated would be incredibly useful, so I started looking for one - can quickly came across this one :

MQ Telemetry Transport
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Liquidware TouchShield Slide for the Arduino

tor — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:59:51 +0000

This shield for the Arduino is sheer pr0n for nerds - it's beautiful (with the possible exclusion of the price) :
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2nd test of cross posting to ping.fm

tor — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:59:21 +0000

Ah - there are 2 different keys from ping.fm, and the developer key is what is needed for the ping.fm module. So a 2nd test is needed. ----------- UPDATE This did not work - so back to the drawing board.

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