Month: September 2012

How to flash a CUL device

First download “Homebrew” – the package manager/builder for OSX and install it.

curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go | ruby

in a terminal window

the make “cup-programmer” by keying the following into the terminal window

brew dfu-programmer

Plug the CUL device into a USB port while holding in the reset button,

Then run

dfu-programmer atmega32u4 erase

dfu-programmer atmega32u4 flash CUL_V3.hex

dfu-programmer atmega32u4 reset

from a terminal window

Unplug the CUL and plug it in again – the LED should start flashing.

Btw. CUL_V3.hex needs to be downloaded from “http://www.busware.de/tiki-index.php?page=CUL”

A CUL device module in ruby

As I have just bought another CUL device to control the thermostats, door sensors and relays around the house I started looking into hooking it into the rest of the monitoring systems in the house, and after having a look at the culfw software I run on the CUL, I decided to write a Ruby module.

201209240918.jpg

So far it’s decoding (Partially) the messaging between the 3 thermostats and the actuators on the radiators, and the status messages from the door sensors.

201209240921.jpg

Jeenode <-> Raspberry pi

A excellent posting on how to hook up the serial ports of a Jeenode to the serial port of a Raspberry PI. This is going to save a lot of time for a lot of people!

One way to connect an RFM12B to a Raspberry Pi is to simply plug in a JeeLink, using the built-in USB capabilities of the RPi. But that’s a bit of a detour – why go through USB?

Since the JeeNode’s FTDI connector can use 5V power and has TX/RX pins at 3.3V logic level, it’s actually a perfect match for directly connecting to a Raspberry Pi. Let’s do it.

I’ll be using the command shell on the RPi, using a network SSH connection, but this could also be done from the console with a keyboard, of course.

[From » Serial hookup JeeNode to Raspberry Pi JeeLabs]

OpenRemote + Raspberry Pi == True

OpenRemote is now available for Raspberry Pi – fits in nicely with the rest of my home automation stuff :

OpenRemote on Raspberry Pi — Update
So it’s no big secret that we’re huge fans of the Raspberry Pi project here at OpenRemote – in case you’ve somehow managed to miss details about Raspberry, it’s a credit card sized board with ARM CPU and Linux distribution in it.

[From Community Blogs – OpenRemote]

WeatherCat – a replacement for Lightsoft Weather Center

I’ve been using LWC (Lightsoft Weather Center) for a couple of years with a weather station outside the house – and it has worked very, very well. But it has a drawback – it is not being updated and further developed.

So of course I was interested when I stumbled across WeatherCat – which seem to be a “drop-in” replacement for LWC :

WeatherCat is designed to work with hardware-based weather stations; as of this time, the following stations are supported:

Davis Vantage, Vue, Envoy, Monitor and Wizard stations. WeatherCat also supports the WeatherLinkIP data-logger.
La Crosse WS23xx range of stations.
Oregon Scientific WMR 928/968 stations.
WeatherHawk stations equipped with an IP server module.
As data is gathered and stored in its database, WeatherCat allows you to view weather statistics such as the lowest temperature, or the highest wind speed over any time period stored in the database. In addition, WeatherCat can generate and upload simple web pages which offer quick ‘canned’ solution to get your weather data on-line as quickly as possible, as well as template driven ‘custom’ web pages that can contain current conditions, graphs, gauges, statistics, webcam images and time-lapse movies; these web pages can be uploaded to your server by WeatherCat for display via a web browser anywhere in the world. A live list of all possible ‘tags’ that can be used in your templates is available here.

[From WeatherCat]


201209142145.jpg

Raspberry pi running FHEM – to control FHT80 thermostats etc

We are using FHEM at home to control our heating systems – so of course I was very interested when I found the following article on running it all on a Raspberry PI!

If everything is correct, you receive some lines out of the CC1101 register and so you know that your connection is working good. Now you can proceed with installing fhem. Download the latest version from the fhem website – for a debian-based system you can use the provided package. But before you need to fulfill the dependencies: perl and the serialport-perl module. A detailed installation-howto can be found on the website, the wiki can be found here.
sudo apt-get install perl libdevice-serialport-perl
wget http://fhem.de/fhem-5.2.deb
dpkg -i fhem-5.2.deb

[From Binerry, Introduction to Home Automation with Raspberry Pi and Fhem]

Air Quality egg getting close to shipping

I have been following the development of the Air Quality Egg for a while (as I want to get/make one) – and it’s now getting closer to shipping

AQE Supplies arriving
Posted: September 10th, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
This is what 2,000 power supplies looks like. Each Egg will be shipping with two power supplies, one for the base station and one for the sensor unit*. These are really nice power supplies and deliver enough clean juice to power the boards and the sensor heating circuits.

[From WickedDevice Blog » Blog Archive » AQE Supplies arriving]