The stair lights are coming along nicely - as a test I now have LED strips glued under the nose of 2 set of steps, and a Jeenode with a PIR movement sensor hanging over the flight of stairs.

The LED strips are controlled by a LED node (from Jeelabs) to give a quick ramp up to the desired light level, and then slowly down over a minute or so. This is one of the nice features of the LEDnode - it has configureable "ramps" or "profiles" with the ability to pre-program these and store them in the LEDnode - ready to be triggered by a short command string from another node.

The software has now been written - and works reasonably well, but will need quite a bit of tweaking.

More to come.

I've spent part of Christmas and the new year refurbishing our stairs (more about that later) - they turned out very nicely indeed.

But now on to the electronics part of this.

- Every step will have a (visually hidden) LED strip under the edge of the step, all connected to a JeeLabs LEDnode, and triggered by another Jeenode with a PIR sensor hanging over the steps (hidden among books on a bookshelf).

So far I have written the necessary software to test the coverage and response time of the motion sensor, and written the necessary routines for the LED node to be triggered by the home monitoring server.

This should be fun.

Interesting :

Heterocera is an implementation of an associative memory system. It is inspired by the concept of a tuple space and by the work of David Gelernter (outlined in his book Mirror Worlds).

Heterocera is designed to enable easy communication in heterogeneous environments (e.g. Arduino applications and web applications). This is done by treating the memory space as a web server - where address locations are URLs. Heterocera will handle single values, rich JSON structures and files.

By reducing all interactions to HTTP GET and POST requests even simple platforms can record and retrieve data.

This is not meant to be a NoSQL system. It is designed to:

One more type of displays

I've tried to do some further analysis of the problems I have with the FHT80B wireless thermostats - and the interference from the Jeenodes in the house.

As I have mentioned before I store all read ins from all the house sensors in a memcached instance on one of the servers - and for the FTH80B's it looks like this (after I throttled the Jeenodes sending frequency)

It basically shows that the last time I heard from the FHT80's was 55 seconds ago for the conservatory thermostat, and 99 seconds from the living room one.

It is also clear from this that the actuator values are send frequently - the rest only less often.