Meet the team
November 3, 2009 at 22:09 | In Ones and Zeros | Leave a CommentTags: arduino, Blogroll, Go Clock, home automation, home easy, homecamp, hursley, IBM, mdm, mdm-workbench, scalextric, uig, User Interface Generator, user modeling, wordle
It looks 2009 is the year for people I work with to start blogging, and they’re all on Twitter… coincidence? So if you’re looking for a good read, you might like to check them out. Starting with the newest blog…
October 2009
Ed’s World (@ejellard) Off to a flying start with some great home automation with arduino, Home Easy, MQTT and a helping of hackery.
Limboworld’s blog (@jaylimburn) Conducting a scientific experiment in to the value of blogging, so make sure you get as many people to read it as possible! Some good DIY posts to kick things off. (There would have been a few DIY posts here if I’d started this blog before fitting the kitchen!)
September 2009
The World Of Gavin (@gavinwillingham) Definite technology slant with an enjoyable hint of grumpy old man which I’m definitely hoping will continue!
April 2009
Cobweb (@techcobweb)
Some really varied arduino projects in addition to home automation and tweeting cats. While the only circuit I’ve cobbled together recently is sitting in an ice cream tub in the porch, Mike is a master at packaging projects- his scalextric race timer is a work of art!
May 2006 (so blogging way longer than the rest of us!)
Not as easy to sum up given the number of posts but a distinct focus on technology of various kinds. Probably need to run it through wordle to get a better idea!
The trouble with making lists like this is that I am bound to have missed a few! I’ll just sneakily add more if I have… which reminds me, I was going to make more of an effort with a blogroll at some point soon.
Home Easy Hacking Wiki
September 3, 2009 at 12:13 | In Ones and Zeros | 3 CommentsTags: arduino, bye bye standbye, Byron, domia lite, freeduino, home automation, home easy, Klik aan Klik uit, Klik on Klik off, PT2262 PT2272, wiki
I recently discovered that someone has created a useful looking Home Easy Hacking Wiki to pull together what information there currently is about hacking a range or related home automation hardware. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet answer Jerd’s question about the automatic protocol, so if you’ve got something working, it would be fantastic if you could add a few more details to the wiki.
Hoping to get back to finishing off a Freeduino Home Easy controller before too much longer- I didn’t even get as far as unwrapping the transmitter last time! I’m currently wondering if the Finite State Machine library that Mike used in his latest project would be useful to handle transmitting and receiving from the same controller.
If you’ve done anything like this before, any tips would be most welcome!
Update: maybe the Southampton Hack Day (via Benjie) would be a suitable opportunity to work on this. (4 Sept 2009)
Update: Thanks to Paul’s post I’ve just discovered another page documenting various 433 MHz AM signals, including devices using PT2262/PT2272 encoder/decoder chips, which klik-aan klik-uit uses apparently. (24 Sept 2009)
And there’s more:
Must get round to finishing this off myself sometime soon! Here are a couple more people who have Home Easy working with the Arduino:
(29 Oct 2009)
My first CurrentCost development board circuit
June 22, 2009 at 17:59 | In Ones and Zeros, Uncategorized | 6 CommentsTags: 555 timer, circuit diagram, CurrentCost, energy, gas, gas meter, home, home automation, home camp, homecamp, house
The result of a fair bit of googling and a weekend of hacking is… [drum roll]… a circuit to connect my gas meter to a CurrentCost Envi using a nice little dev board from CurrentCost…
Now I’m much more familiar with messing about with software, not all this messy hardware stuff, so I’m really hoping to get some feedback to improve this early prototype!
So, my theory is that the stuff on the left will trigger the timer on the positive edge of the pulse from the gas meter. R1 and C1 control the 555 timing; more on that in a second. And the stuff on the right (LED and the CurrentCost dev board) should be triggered whenever the gas meter is running and emitting pulses. It all seems to work, except that I can’t seem to get the timing quite right. The gas meter takes about 1m40s between pulses, and I can choose values for R1 and C1 that trigger the output for the right length of time when a single pulse is detected, unfortunately subsequent pulses don’t keep the output on as I was hoping. The best I’ve managed is with R1 = 3M ohms and C1 = 100uF, which does stay on as long as there are pulses from the meter… unfortunately just for a little too long at 5 minutes. Still, at least the CurrentCost Envi will get a reading all the time the boiler is running, and it won’t get stuck on if the meter stops on the portion of the dial where the reed switch is closed.
Any comments with glaring errors, small problems, improvements, or a completely different way to do it?!
Updated: looks like I was having problems with left and right in my first description! Hopefully I’ve got them the right way round now! (2 July 2009)
Update: for an alternative approach (latching a pulse and clearing it when the cc board transmits) take a look at the circuit and photos on John’s blog. (9 July 2009)
GasCost
June 20, 2009 at 09:21 | In Ones and Zeros | 1 CommentTags: 555 timer, CurrentCost, energy, gas, gas meter, home, home automation, home camp, homecamp, house
I’m getting pretty close to getting the gas meter hoked up to CurrentCost. Not quite the finished thing, but was pretty excited when I got this working…
It’s a 555 timer circuit (using a low power 555 chip) which I’m hoping will keep the CurrentCost dev board transmitting a value as long as the gas meter is running. I’ve since added a capacitor to trigger on an edge so it shouldn’t keep transmitting if the meter stops on the ‘pulse’ position, which is probably around 1/8th of the time on my meter.
I wasn’t quite sure everything was working when I finished last night, but it does seem to do what I want when I was showing Jo this morning, so hopefully all I need to do is get the timing right for the gas meter, rather than me hitting a button every few seconds. More details to follow if it does work.
Home Easy -duino
February 1, 2009 at 12:50 | In Ones and Zeros, Uncategorized | 5 CommentsTags: home automation, arduino, home easy, freeduino, domia lite, bye bye standbye
So I’ve done a bit of playing with the Freeduino and I can see why people like Arduinos so much: they really are simple to get working. It might only start with a blinking LED but it’s nice to feel you’ve achieved something so quickly. I wish more software was like that!
The reason for getting an arduino was to experiment with some more home automation, so I’ve ordered 433MHz AM transmitter and receiver modules which look (to the untrained eye) like they should work with my Home Easy sockets. Hopefully they’ll also be simple to wire up to the arduino as well! I’ve found a couple of projects which look like they might help get me started with the code:
In fact, combining infrared with Home Easy, to turn off a couple of sockets when putting the TV on standbye for example, might be interesting. The first thing I want to try (assuming I get it working at all!) is forwarding commands via the arduino. So, for example, the arduino could relay an on command to the living room lamp, but only if the CurrentCost reading is low enough (i.e. the kitchen lights aren’t still on)!
I’ve been using the simple oscilloscope hack to do some prototyping while I wait for the AM modules to arrive, and I’ve managed to ’send’ a sample signal that looks about right. I’m not so sure about how good the timing is going to be though, and I’m still pondering about receiving Home Easy commands. Any suggestions about the best way to do this kind of thing would be most welcome!
Home Camp
November 23, 2008 at 22:54 | In Ones and Zeros | Leave a CommentTags: home automation, home camp, homecamp, house
Home Camp is next weekend so I though it was about time I put something marginally less pointless on my House page; there’s now a quick summary of what I’ve played with so far, instead of the old experimental graphs that were starting to gather dust. Looking forward to getting a few more ideas to add to the list on Saturday.
Update: Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay the whole day, although I’m very please I made it to the start and still got back in time for Howards wedding. Thanks to the internet, I’ve been catching up on what I missed. In no particular order, here’s a selection of links I’ve found interesting so far:
- Phoebe’s Jottings from homecamp
- Tom’s post covering demand shifting (the first bit of homecamp I missed)
- Real time operational data from the national grid (a.k.a. how many people are making a nice cup of tea)
- How balanced is the UK grid at the moment? Not something I’ve ever asked, but an interesting answer even so.
- Flashy photo board from yellowpark
- And last but by no means least, Nicholas has a good post with clips from the live streaming.
There’s plenty more to keep up with on the friendfeed HomeCamp room.
Home very easy
October 20, 2008 at 23:25 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | 3 CommentsTags: B&Q, Byron, home automation, home easy
Since Graham posted about the Home Easy range I’ve been wondering whether to give it a try. Well, okay, it was always more like a question of when not if, so when we were in the vicinity of the Home Easy shelf in B&Q (just the next aisle or so over… the other side of the store) I had a quick look. To have a better look, I bought a pack to take home!
My first purchase wasn’t all that successful. I had been seduced by the wiz-bang timer remote control pack, which comes with two dimable sockets. Unfortunately, while the pack says you can switch on and off as well as dim, it lies; the sockets are not dimable, they only dim. Fortunately one of the great things about B&Q is their customer service, so I took my first attempt back and got a refund.
I played it safe with my second attempt and got the simple controller and three socket pack from the on-off part of the range. It’s probably better value, even though I currently only need two of the three sockets. Pairing the remote and sockets is pleasingly simple and the group function is very nice; you get the everything off function even without buying the switch that Graham did. (Not that I’ve ruled out extra bits in the future of course!)
Jo and I discovered an extra use for the remote control yesterday when she wasn’t feeling well: instead of yelling downstairs to ask me to do anything, she could just flash the lamp on and off! I might regret suggesting that idea!
Definitely very happy with my delayed impulse buy but there are one or two niggles…
Pros:
- Very easy to use
- The basic pack is pretty good value
- Really very easy to use
Cons:
- Doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin (box); check what you’re buying will do what you want it to
- There’s no way to switch a socket on or off without using the remote. I guess the excuse is to keep costs down, but slightly bigger button could easily do press on/off and hold to pair
- The dimable sockets can’t do simple on/off as well. Actually the dimming is fairly naff all round: press on, wait until it dims to the right level and press on again
Graphing CurrentCost using RRDtool
June 1, 2008 at 23:02 | In Ones and Zeros | 3 CommentsTags: CurrentCost, home, home automation, Netvoyager, rrdtool, SLAX, Wii
I’ve not been doing much with my CurrentCost data lately, having been slightly distracted with upgrading my home server OS. Well, upgrading is possibly a slightly odd description for a running a new live CD system but to compile rrdtool I grabbed the latest version (6.0.7) of SLAX instead of SLAMPPLite which is based on an older release. I really like the new version of SLAX so I’ve been experimenting with some home server type customizations, manually so far since MySLAX creator only seems to understand older versions, but I might give SLAX Tools a go too.
Anyway, while not quite as interesting as Dale’s CurrentCost bill, I now have a working RRDtool SLAX module. RRDtool seems ideal for graphing CurrentCost data. I’m aiming for something like this example, which would be perfect for viewing on a TV using the Wii but to start with I’ve been giving it a simple trial run over the last day. Here are the results so far:
Looking pretty good, and I think there are a few more features of RRDtool that could prove useful.
Update: found another great example of using RRDtool for CurrentCost data, which has a link to another page with exactly the kind of RRDtool settings you’ll need for a CurrentCost meter! (17 November 2008)
Update: looks like Chris Dalby has RRDtool hooked up as well now. Hope to post about RRDtool again soon with the commands I’m using; just need a couple more tweaks! (7 December 2008)
Flashing light
May 17, 2008 at 20:18 | In Ones and Zeros | 1 CommentTags: arduino, doorbell, hacking, hacks, home, home automation
Roo’s been doing some open circuit board surgery on a doorbell so his house can twitter when it has visitors. By a stoke of luck (they were in the bargain bin when I needed one!) my doorbell flashes a light as well sounding a bell when it goes off:
Hopefully making it easy to hook up to one of these (when they’re available) with no chance of breaking the doorbell!
RESTful house
March 19, 2008 at 23:56 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything, Ones and Zeros | 8 CommentsTags: arduino, home automation, Linksys, mqtt, NSLU2, REST
Possibly a little premature (not sold the current house yet!) but I’ve been pondering the opportunity for playing with home automation when we find a new house.
Not even having the house yet means I have a completely blank canvas so I’m on the look out for ideas. On the hardware side, Nigel has mentioned Arduino a few times which sounds pretty interesting, plus there’s the Slug option. Laptops seem to get used too but I’d rather avoid that. On the where to start side, Andy’s house uses MQTT, is in Second Life, Twitters, and has a pretty worrying power meter graph, which should provide a few ideas! He’s not the only one- it would seem that IBMers like their home automation projects. Like Glenn, low cost is high on my list of requirements (I will have just undergone open wallet surgery buying a house!) although I suspect my idea of low is lower than Glenn’s! I also want it to be low power- very low power, so I’m pondering some sort of mesh approach to avoid any kind of server… as such… just because really! I quite like the idea of giving the house a REST interface. I don’t want any fans. So a clear set of requirements there then.
Any thoughts, suggestions, success/horror stories?
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