Nicholas Booth Dot Com

This week saw the introduction of the Home Automation Hub which I put together last weekend. The primary function so far is to act as a bridge for the Current Cost monitor system and Pachube. This has replaced my old solution which collected data into a local MySQL database and then sent averaged results to Pachube. This was somewhat inefficient and not easy to extend. the HAH means that I have now been able to integrate the Individual Applicance Modules that work with the CC unit – so Pachube presently has five streams of data.

One of these streams will allow me, for the first time, to reliably monitor the power consumption of the Christmas Lights. I previously tried to do this with a Maplin plug-in monitor which melted a few years ago making an odd smell and posed something of an unexpected danger!

Construction was fairly straightforward, however this is not a project to the novice constructor and a reasonable level of skill in working without highly detailed instructions was necessary. Nothing particularly difficult, though, and it worked first time. It took longer to get to grips with configuration of the data streams as this requires some careful reading and interpretation of the notes. I have yet to work out the best way to try and integrate things with the X10 house control system – and if it won’t work directly the xAP system which is deeply embedded looks promising.

The HAH will allow for additional functions in due course, perhaps one day to include a garden watering system – pending getting A Round Tuit.

Today saw the long awaited arrival of an Arduino starter kit. Ordered from oomlout a couple of days ago it’s arrived in good time, and made a great impression.
The kit itself is neat, tidy and very well presented in a plastic compartment box – so no cause for untidiness or losing anything – together with a great little guide to getting started. The guide, as well as some handy introductory material about the kit, programming and electronic components. After that each page takes you through constructing a small experiment – working up in complexity and using all the components in the kit.
I chose to install the IDE on my eee 1000H netbook rather than my desktop as it had a much more up to date Ubuntu installation which met the requirements without any further hassle.

I started with the first example – to make a LED blink – and discovered how case sensitive the sketch seems to be – but it was easy to work out where I was wrong from the way it debugged during the compile and highlighted the offending line.
A very quick upload later and the LED was blinking merrily away. So easy to change the mark/space ratio by altering the delays in the loop and uploading again. How easy is that?
I see much time to be spent playing and learning how to get the best from this. Very satsifying indeed.

I’ve finally broken, and splashed out in a Starter Kit for the Arduino.  I’ve ordered the kit from Oomlout.co.uk as it seems to have lots of bits along with a decent size breadboard and natty holder to fix the board and the Arduino unit itself together which should make it more stable.  It also has a servo motor which I’ve never used before, although the rest of the components are pretty familiar, and which I’m looking forward to getting to grips with.  The only problem is there are just too  many possible projects I’d like to construct!

In other news it seems Paul and Clare are to marry in the Summer.  Invite arived today so that day’s already been set aside in our diary.  We’re very much looking forward to the event, and finally meeting the lady herself – all previous attempts have failed through severe diary congestion.

This is really just a short note to file away for the future.  Having recently discovered the Arduino, and seem many of the things it’s been made to do, I wanted to jot down a few ideas I might follow up myself one day.  Real Work seems to get in the  way most of the time, but with a long history of dabbling in radio and electronics and having built many gadgets, radios, remote controls and so forth, the Arduino looks like a fab  way to interface with mechanicals.

So the first idea is a way to play some little bells to make tunes.  I have a couple of sets of mini bells from B&Q some years ago which play a fixed set of Christmas tunes, controlled from a small box and a 12v supply.  If I can interface each bell line to the Arduino using a (reed) relay [or even directly, perhaps?] I’d have an eight note one octave player.  A quick look on the ‘net shows someone has made a similar bell tower from hand bells, however I’d like to be able to play more than one note at a time.  Input from a text file of some sort – I’ve seen a form of music notation that might do the trick, but this needs more investigation.  Ultimately I could build a multi-octave machine like a player piano or adapt a harmonium.

Second Idea: Temperature sensors on the heating system to measure use and efficiency – and combine with a gas meter reader to complete the energy consumption records  via Pachube (i.e. to add the the electric consumption data).

Third idea: Talking parrot, an adaptation of an ambient orb.  I have a USB parrot which only works on Win and has no recent drivers or apparent way to use in Linux/OSX – so I’m going to keep it for possible hacking in the future.  Flap wings or nod head , open beak etc to relay data values of some sort.  The higher the home energy use, the more the little bird will fidget.

Well, a number of things to think about today; first the lead developer on one of our magazines told me he was leaving the organisation.  I’ve really enjoyed working with him over the past two or three years, but I wish hime every success in whatever he moves on to.  He’s young enough and without ties such that it could be anything, anywhere.  Good luck, Ken.

Secondly, Amazon have finally given a date for the Practical Arduino book to arrive (well, not “a” date, but a range of dates) but at last it’s on its way.  Have been reading more on-line snippets and trying to formulate a few ideas about what to choose as a project; many ideas floating around, so once I get used to the gadget I’ll have plenty to choose from.  The elctronics bit isn’t a problem, but I do wonder how well I’ll get on with the programming side of things.  I’ll just have to do what I do with everything else and adapt what I can find that’s almost what I want.

Work threw up few challenges, but I had to get the IRC client working again.  No reply to my question on the #movabletype channel, but I answered myself anyway within a few minutes, and I guess most of the Americans were probably still in bed anyway.   I finished my scheme for excluding IP addresses from the blog infrastructure – mainly to stop search and other bots wasting cgi-bin resources, but I did have problems during the day with a Chineese e-mail address scraper which caused some outages of part of the system.  Hopefully, not any more!