www.gisvold.co.uk

At home at the moment

tor — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:42:34 +0000

Oh dear - my harddisk is not doing so well

tor — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:44:20 +0000

I;ve had a few speed issues with my MacNook after I changed/upgraded the internal hard disk, but not done anything about it until now, as it was getting ridiculous.

Xbench to the rescue :

As you can see it's appallingly slow …..(scores should ideally be around 100)

Got my self a fitbit - and last nights sleep pattern was

tor — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:26:35 +0000

As my wife can attest - I sleep well, and this possibly confirms it.

Today's coffee

tor — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:15:43 +0000

El Salavor Alaska bourbon - apparently.

Our 2 electricity monitors

tor — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:38:46 +0000

This describes the situation in a nutshell

As you can see they report electricity consumption around with approximately 15% difference. One is a Wattson - the other one a costco Envir sensor.

Next - what is the real usage?

Stair lights and Jeenodes

tor — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:47:23 +0000

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.

South West Trains and wheelchair space

tor — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:34:27 +0000

Hm! South West Trains do not really respect their own notices regarding reserved space for wheelchairs (and prams).

(Click for larger)

Current project - stair lights with LED's and Jeenodes

tor — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:17:10 +0000

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.

Problems with electronics manufacturing in the UK

tor — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:06:33 +0000

From the raspberry.pi blog - some seriously important information :

growl-ruby is dead - long live growl_notify

tor — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:15:21 +0000

I use Prowl to send notifications from our home monitoring system to my iPhone and iPad etc.

But I have been using the gem "ruby-growl" to do this for quite a while.

Growl was just updated to version 1.3 - and this broke "ruby=-growl".

But to help others with the same problem - drop in "growl_notify" - make a few simple changes, and all is good again.

Coffee subscriptions

tor — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:08:55 +0000

I've jus subscribed to coffee deliveries (once per week) from Hasbean - I will have to wait to see how this works out.

Gas usage in our house

tor — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:00:01 +0000

After we installed proper electronic thermostats and linked them to our house monitoring system I've tracked the gas usage for the whole house

It looks a bit funny for the first 6 months of 2010 as I did not do manual reading at this stage, but the graph tells a interesting story. Btw. December 2010 was substantially colder than December 2011 as well.

Added to that we got 700£ back at the end of 2010 due to reduction of usage reduced usage compared to previous years. This is looking promising as well.

Heterocera - a simple database for Arduinos / Jeenodes

tor — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:10:58 +0000

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:

The mushrooms

tor — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:28:15 +0000

The current state of our Shitake mushrooms

(Click for larger)

Hm - not like when I saw them at the stand.

I must be doing something wrong (-;

My first Thingspeak graph

tor — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:58:44 +0000

Added my first ThingSpeak graph today - all it took was a few lines of code, and the graph looks like this :

The second graph is a live iFrame embedded from the ThingSpeak site.

Growing mushrooms (again)

tor — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:46:21 +0000

Just before Christmas I walked past a stand outside Festival hall - and there was a guy selling Shitake Mushroom "logs" - as the one in the picture

(Click for larger)

- It's made of sawdust and supposed to start growing mushrooms within 1-2 weeks.

Search - and the no-result backfill issue

tor — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:37:47 +0000

I have a pet hate - the so called "np result backfill"

This is a syndrome that occurs on websites that use text search - and in situations where your search normally would result in no results returned.

The commercial owners of sites are so afraid that you will leave their site in disgust - and will rather show you non-relevant results than no results at all.

Personally I'd rather see nothing than being presented by non-relevant stuff.

Displays for the home monitoring

tor — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:20:05 +0000

One more type of displays

Thermostats - Jeenodes and noise

tor — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:49:20 +0000

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.

Energy saving lights - and optimism

tor — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:05:47 +0000

From Amazon - specifications for one of their LED floodlights

- eh - 50.000 years?? How did they test this?