In the process of making some changes to my home network in an effort to reduce the amount of power I use for always-on equipment in the apartment. Or at least that’s what I tell people, actually I’m just in it for the gadgets.
Current network is my cable modem, connected to my home storage server/router, which is then connected to a WRT54g which is just being used as a switch and 802.11b/g access point. From there we have my desktop PC, and an Ethernet over powerline bridge to my entertainment center with the XBox 360 and the TiVo HD.
So the plan is to rip out the storage server (a Dell Dimension E521) and the WRT54g, replacing them with an Apple Airport Extreme with an external drive array. This also upgrades my wireless to 802.11n and my wired stuff to gigabit. Eventually, it’ll look something like this:
I picked up the Airport Extreme last night, planning to install it this weekend to take over routing and wireless. I figure I’ll keep the storage server around until I figure out what I want to do for an external drive array off the Airport. I’d like to get a drobo, but they’re still somewhat pricey to me. It is the simplest to maintain solution though.
I’d also like to keep a FreeBSD box on my network so I have something I can shell in to. Somewhat looking at the MSI Wind PC as a low power BSD box. I could mount storage from the Airport and just boot from a CF card (which the Wind PC supports, apparently) to keep power consumption down.
Of course, all of this means spending more money and adding to my pile of computer stuff I don’t use, which already contains a mini-ITX motherboard that I could use for a low-power BSD box, though it would mean buying a power supply and IDE/CF adapter, which would probably add up to most of the cost of the Wind PC and be less powerful. So I’m not sure which path I’m going to take.
I should probably just be happy with what I have and save my money, but what fun is that?
Now that I’m moved in to the new place, I’ve been giving some more thought to my temp and power monitoring projects. In the old place, my server was located in the same closet as the punch-block for the phone wiring. In the new place, they’re not even close. In order to have more than 2 thermal sensors, I’ll need to put the Basic Stamp II in with the punch block, so I’ll need a way of getting it’s reading back to my server for monitoring.
I was considering serial, using the phone line to the office as RS-485, but I remember all the headaches I had with 485 when working at SimPro, so I’m kindof leaning away from that. For the price of one 232/485 converter, I can get two XBee modules and carrier boards at Adafruit.
I’m also considering hacking apart my Kill-A-Watt to make a Wattcher, basically an XBee crammed into the Kill-A-Watt housing to allow for remote monitoring. I could then use that to track the usage of individual or small groups of devices, which would be nice even if I do decide to install T.E.D. in my breaker panel.
Been thinking a bit lately about projects to keep me busy in the new apartment, and I’ve got a couple of ideas that I think will be pretty neat.
First, I’ve been interested in tracking the temperature in my apartment. There is only one thermostat, and I can’t think of a good way to pull any info off of it, so I’ve been looking into other sensor equipment. The iButton stuff looks pretty promising; the temp-only sensor buttons are pretty inexpensive, and the HA7Net looks like a good way to interface to them without having to mess around with line level protocols. Since I don’t use the landline phones, I’m thinking I’ll cut off the connection to the phone company and reuse the existing phone jacks in the apartment to make a 1-wire bus. Just solder an RJ-11 plug onto the temp sensor iButtons, and I can put a sensor everywhere there’s a wall jack! The controller is about $155 and the sensors are $7.50/each in the quantities I’d be looking at.
The other thing I’d like to monitor is power consumption. I’ve got a Kill-a-watt, but that only works for a single outlet. I’ve been eying The Energy Detective, which installs into your breaker panel with a number of inductive probes and a connection to communicate it’s readings over the power lines (similar to X10.) The only problem is their software is currently only for Windows. The older version had a serial port on the receiver to communicate with, the new version has USB, and I suspect it’s just a USB to serial adapter of some kind. To do what I want to do (feed the data into Munin) I’d have to figure out how to talk to the thing, which might make for a good project. T.E.D. sells for $145.
I’m also going to need a new vacuum cleaner. The old one is Delia’s, so it’ll be going away. I’m leaning toward spending the extra money and buying a Dyson, specifically the DC 25. The reviews are all very good on them, and it sounds like they last forever. Seems like one of those things where it’s worth to spend the extra up front and get something you’re happy with instead of skimping and replacing it later because you hate it.
I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.
- Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.
- HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.
- Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.
- Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.
Finally killed my WoW account the other week, not sure if it’s stopped working yet or not, haven’t really cared to check. Delia’s considering canceling her account, but hasn’t made the decision one way or the other yet. Feels good to not be sitting in front of the computer the whole time I’m at home, though I usually wind up in front of the TV watching a DVD with my laptop going, but still…
With my new-found spare time I managed to get one of my projects done; I now have a working garage door opener remote! Ended up buying a 4-relay box from PepBoys and wiring it to a power supply from radio shack and velcoing it to the back of the door opener unit. Near as I can tell the relay box was designed to be used in a car to remotely turn on/off accessories like lights to show off to your friends. The outputs could be put in a momentary mode though, so it worked out perfectly for the door opener. As a bonus, I know have 3 spare relay channels in my garage that I could use for something, if I think of anything cool to put out there.
I’ve got a few coding projects I want to work on too, the most important of which is an online scheduling calendar for Delia’s De-Stress Center. I had started it in PHP, but now that I’m working with Mason all the time at work, I decided to switch over and use that instead. It should be relatively simple to throw together, I just need to sit down and get it done one of these nights. It’s harder than I think it should be to sit down and code after getting home from a day of sitting and coding.
I also want to take pieces of the old SimPro code and turn it into a home automation controller. I think the data collection and scripting stuff would work out great with an X-10 interface and a couple of tweaks. I want to scrap the website side of it though and rewrite that from scratch, which will take some time. It’s all in PHP currently, and I have a hard time following the code in a lot of places. That’s probably going to be a long term project.
Also, Evil Dave wants to build a recipe website, which I think would be really cool. I just need to make time to work on that as well. So many projects…
Finally got around to making some updates to my website today. I had been putting off working on the rest of the templates for WordPress, and finally fixed a couple of them today. I still have the archive pages to update to match my style, but the individual post pages work right now (for example, this one.) I like how the WP template system works, it’s a lot easier to deal with than MovableType’s, and you can use pretty much any PHP you want.
Also did some poking around to find a power and data cable for my GPS and found this site. They make and sell an alternative to the overpriced cables from Garmin, including the eMax cable. I think I’ll buy one once I have the money to spare. I figure it’d pay for itself after it takes the place of a few packs of AA’s that I usually go through on roadtrips with my GPS. I’ve also been thinking of starting to use the GPS with work, marking points for each dealership. I figure I could eventually make a map with all our customers marked on it, which would help out any new drivers that come along. At least, I would find such a map helpful.
And all that GPS thinking got me thinking about the Mobile PC project again. There’s a lot of slick hardware out there for the project now, including a Mini-ITX enclosure specifically designed for car PC’s. And I got to chatting with about it, and we got to thinking that having the box be able to participate in a mesh network with other car PC’s in the area would be pretty useful. Something like MeshAP would do nicely, then you could do all sorts of fun stuff like VoIP communication between vehicles and shared music collections and vehicle tracking information. The VoIP stuff got me thinking that using Bluetooth headsets connected to the Car PC would be pretty cool.
I think it’s something I should definitely spend some time on, especially if I can ever get the equipment together to actually implement such a setup.
Anyway, I think that’s enough rambling for now. I think my WoW addiction is fading, and my brain is starting to grind on all these ideas again.
Been giving a bit of thought to a project recently. I’d like to write a web based event planning application, primarily for use by my gaming clan for planning LAN parties and movie get-togethers, and that sort of thing. This is all loosely based off the #978 Events page, which I think is largely defunct now.
Just trying to jot down some ideas about events at the moment.
Events should have three states, planning, open, and closed. In the planning stage, the date for the event is not yet known. Users viewing the event can see a list of possible dates and select which ones would be best for them. The event planner (a user) can then decide which date to have the event on. At this point the date is fixed and the event switches to the ‘open’ state.
In the open state, users can register whether or not they will be attending the event, along with any notes and comments they may have. This is a direct rip-off of the #978 system. Users can change their note and status at any time in order to reflect the changing world in which we live.
After the event has passed, it’ll switch over to closed, so that people don’t sign up for things that have already happened.
None of this is really all that difficult from a programming perspective, it’s just trying to get the interface to be something easy to use and intuitive for people. I think it’ll help a lot with our LAN party planning, since we currently just use our forum’s poll feature, which doesn’t allow for multiple answers or tracking who voted for what.
Perhaps I’ll get to this after Delia’s calendar.
